Married To Darkness

Chapter 515: But I Love You, I fear

"Alaric! I love you! Why don’t you love me back?!" she yelled, shocking him.

Alaric froze. The warmth that had been radiating from him seemed to crystallize into a shocked, brittle stillness. His hand, which had been tracing tender patterns on her spine, went limp, his fingers curling slightly against the silk of her gown.

The silence that followed was deafening, broken only by the sharp, rhythmic snap of the dying fire. Salviana’s chest heaved, her outburst still echoing off the stone walls, the raw desperation of her voice hanging in the air like smoke.

He pulled back just enough to look at her, his dark eyes wide and searching. For a long moment, he didn’t speak. He looked like a man who had been struck, the vibrant glow he’d carried just moments ago replaced by a haunted, hollow intensity.

"Salviana," he whispered, his voice cracking—a sound so rare it made her heart ache even through her anger. "What are you saying?"

"Don’t lie to me!" she cried, her eyes shimmering with the threat of tears. She pushed against his chest, not to leave, but to find some friction against the agonizing gentleness of his touch. "You look at me with such hunger, you touch me like I’m something holy, but you keep a part of yourself locked away in a room I can’t enter. You want to carve another woman’s name into your skin! You want to carry her ghost on your shoulder while you lie in my bed!"

She grabbed the front of his discarded shirt on the bed, her knuckles white. "If you loved me, there would be no Anne-Marie. If you loved me, you wouldn’t need to ’survive’ your memories. You say Embrez casts shadows, but it’s your shadows that are drowning me!"

Alaric’s expression shifted from shock to a jagged, agonizing sort of realization. He didn’t pull away from her frantic grip. Instead, he reached up, his large, cold hands covering hers, pinning them to his chest so she could feel the erratic, thundering rhythm of his heart.

"You think I don’t love you?" Alaric’s voice dropped into a low, feral growl, a sound vibrating with more agonizing pain than anger. "Salviana, I have spent centuries in a frozen hell. I have forgotten the taste of sunlight. I have been a monster, a weapon, a shadow in my own father’s house. And then... you

."

He leaned in, his face inches from hers. His breath hitched, the scent of her fire warring with the cold iron of his resolve. "You walked into my life with a soul that didn’t flinch when it saw my fangs. I don’t just love you, Salviana. I am consumed by you. You are the only reason I bother to keep my humanity from slipping through my fingers."

"Then why?" Salviana’s voice broke, her hands trembling against his chest. "Then make me a woman! I know you crave me—I can feel it in the way you touch me."

"A thousand times more than you could ever want me," Alaric rasped, his eyes dark with a hunger that looked like suffering.

"Then show me," she choked out, tears finally spilling over. She reached for him, her voice a fragile, desperate hiccup. "Please... make love to me."

"I can’t. I can’t, Fiery," he whispered, his forehead dropping against hers. He looked like a man standing on the edge of a precipice. "You’re too precious. I won’t be the thing that breaks you."

"You asked me to trust you," she said, her fingers digging into his shoulders. "I do. I trust you with my life."

"My love, I trust you with everything I have," he countered, his voice thick. "But I need you to trust yourself. You don’t know..." He trailed off, his gaze unfocusing as if he were looking at a ghost standing right behind her.

"What don’t I know?" She sniffed, her emerald eyes fierce even through the salt of her tears. "Look at me, Alaric. Tell me."

"I killed her, Salviana!" The roar ripped from his throat, sudden and violent, shaking the very foundations of the room. He recoiled from her as if his own touch were poison. "I am a monster!"

Salviana let out a frustrated breath, her hand coming up to her forehead in a sharp gesture of exasperation. "I’ve told you before! You were a child. A mother dying in childbirth is a tragedy of nature, not a crime of the son. You weren’t a killer at birth!"

"Not my mother," he spat, the words jagged and sharp. "Someone else. And I wasn’t a baby when it happened."

Salviana froze. The confusion hit her like a physical blow, stalling the air in her lungs. If his fear didn’t stem from the Queen’s death, then what was this darkness he carried?

"I killed the first woman who ever truly loved me," Alaric whispered, the roar gone, replaced by a hollow, defeated shell of a man. "She was kind. She was gentle. I was her entire world... and I slaughtered her."

Salviana forgot her own tears. The room felt bone-chillingly cold as she stepped toward him. "How? Alaric, what happened?"

"That is the true curse, Salviana. I don’t remember." He looked down at his hands as if he expected to see them turning red. "I woke up that morning, the sun hitting the floor, and she was lying there... in a pool of her own blood. Right next to me. I was the only one in the room. I was the only one with the strength."

Salviana reached out, her fingers tentatively brushing his arm. "Who was she?"

"Anne-Marie," he breathed.

The name hit her like a thunderclap. Anne-Marie. The name he wanted to carve into his skin. The name she had spent days envying.

"Who is she?" she asked, the audacity of her curiosity finally overriding her fear. "Who was Anne-Marie to you?"

"My caregiver," he whispered.

The realization washed over Salviana, turning her world upside down. Her face fell, her heart aching with a new, sharper kind of grief. She had been wrong. Anne-Marie wasn’t a lost lover or a secret flame—she was the woman who had raised him when the world wouldn’t look at him. She was his heart, and he believed he had torn it out.

She looked at the man she loved, seeing the crushing weight of a memory he didn’t even possess. Did he really do it? The questions swirled in her head, but seeing the broken expression on his face, she realized the truth didn’t matter as much as the fact that he had been carrying this blood alone for a lifetime.

"I woke up in her blood, Salviana," he repeated, the words sounding like a death sentence. "How can you look at me and not see the teeth? How can you ask me to make you mine when I don’t even know what the monster does while I’m sleeping?"

Salviana didn’t flinch. She reached out, her hands cupping his face, forcing his gaze away from the ghosts in the corners of the room and back to her. Her thumbs brushed over his cheekbones, her touch a warm, living anchor.

"Alaric, listen to me," she said, her voice dropping into a tone of absolute, unshakable clarity.