Prologue
520 Words
They say every girl meets a love at nineteen.
The kind that would either make her.
or break her.
Velvera Blues never believed in childish sayings or dreamy superstitions. Not when life in Grayes had already decided what she was long before love ever found her.
In a kingdom built on power, blood determined worth.
At the top stood the Seers. Long lived, feared, and worshipped like gods.
Beneath them were the Gifters, blessed with healing, fortune, and beauty.
And at the very bottom were the Doomers, cursed with darkness, death, and misfortune.
Velvera belonged to the lowest rank.
Worse still—
She had no power at all.
Born to a doomer couple and still unable to awaken any gift by nineteen, she was treated like an insult to an already despised bloodline.
The whispers followed her everywhere.
Empty blood.
A doomer without doom.
Useless girl.
Outcast.
At school, they hid her books and laughed while she searched for them. They poured spoiled milk over her uniforms and mocked the tears she refused to shed. The boys asked her out as a joke and girls sneered when she walked past.
At the markets, it was no different as mothers dragged their children aside as if failure could spread by touch and the neighbors lowered their voices whenever she passed.
Grayes had many cruelties and she had learned them young.
Only one thing had ever loved her back.
Art.
Until she met Camino de Santiago.
He arrived on the first day of college like a storm wrapped in expensive fabric. Everyone could tell he was a powerful seer from his aura. Shoulder length brown hair, gray eyes and a godlike physique, he was beautiful in a dangerous way. His presence turned noisy rooms silent. His gaze made people lower theirs. Cold, ruthless and untouchable, he was everything Velvera had grown to hate.
Yet somehow, the barricade of ice between them melted into a fire flare that ignited forbidden feelings between them. They tried to fight it but it consumed them before they could even realize it.
Sharp words turned to stolen glances and lingering touches. Then secret meetings in his house with the moon as their witness.
Velvera, foolish and nineteen, believed him.
So she gave him everything.
Her trust.
Her first love.
Her innocence.
And on the morning after her twentieth birthday, she woke to an empty bed.
Velvera learned two months later that he had left her one final gift.
A child.
So while Grayes celebrated its future king, she learned how to survive.
How to swallow hunger without crying.
How to ignore the stares of those who mocked unmarried mothers.
How to hold a baby with one hand while gathering the shattered remains of herself with the other.
She named her daughter Eloise.
And loved her enough to keep breathing.
She was driven to extreme ways in order to provide for her child but fate was far from done, throwing her to a wolf who would change her life.
They said love at nineteen would make or break a girl.
Velvera knew better.
Some love to do both.
- Writer
