She smiled. It was small and sad and private, the smile of a woman remembering something that still hurt after twenty years.
"He was sitting at his desk, reading. He looked up. He did not speak. He simply looked at me, and I looked at him, and I understood in that moment — not with my mind but with something deeper, something in my blood, something that recognized him the way iron recognizes a lodestone — that I was in terrible, irreversible danger. Not because he was a vampire. I did not know that yet. But because he was the most beautiful, the most lonely, the most devastatingly sad creature I had ever seen, and I wanted to fix him, Isadora. I wanted to reach across that desk and put my hands on his face and tell him that whatever was making him look like that, I would fight it for him. I was sixteen years old and I had known him for approximately four seconds and I was already willing to burn down the world for a man whose name I did not know."
