Lilian kept her gaze to the wall of photographs, unable to look directly at Dante. So many lives he had called failures. Each one represented a life destroyed, a family torn apart, someone who had woken up one day without knowing their normal life was about to end.
Just like her.
"What about sunlight?" Lilian asked, breaking the silence. It was the question that had been haunting her since Adrian first mentioned it. The idea of never feeling the sun on her skin again, frightened her.
Dante shifted in his chair, pulling her attention to him. When she finally looked at him, his dark eyes were fixed on her with an intensity that made her want to look away again. She forced herself to hold his gaze.
"Sunlight burns us, though not in the way the stories suggest," he said. "We don't burst into flames like in movies. But prolonged exposure causes serious damage, the UV radiation disrupts our bodies at a cellular level. Most of us avoid it entirely, and many haven't felt the sun in centuries."
Centuries. Imagining herself to live two hundred years, watching the world change around her while she stayed the same, made her feel dizzy and small.
"So I lose everything," she whispered, more to herself than to him.
"Not everything," Dante replied, leaning forward a little. The afternoon light brushed across his face, outlining features that were too perfect and too symmetrical to be entirely natural. "You keep your memories, your personality, your ability to love, to feel, to make choices. You are not becoming a monster, Lilian. Just a different version of yourself."
"A version that drinks blood and can't step outside during the day," Lilian snapped, unable to keep the bitterness from leaking into her voice. "A version that could kill someone if I lose control for even a second. That sounds like a monster to me, no matter how much you try to romaticize it."
Dante didn't answer. He stood with that smooth grace and walked to the window, silhouetted against the gold bright afternoon light.
"We all struggled with that at first," he admitted quietly. "None of us accepted it easily. Adrian tried to end his life for a decade. Lucien became a butcher until we found him and forced him to learn control."
He turned back to face her, and there was vulnerability exposed in his expression that she hadn't seen before.
"I spent my fifty years convinced I was damned," Dante continued. "I believed this was punishment for sins I couldn't even name. I hunted rogues with a kind of violence that nearly destroyed me, trying to somehow make up for the people I killed in my first weeks as a newborn."
Lilian leaned forward without realizing it, drawn into his story despite her fear and anger.
He moved away from the window and settled back into his chair. "Eventually, you find a reason to exist. You find purpose. It isn't the life you choose, but it can still be a life worth living."
"And if I never find that?" Lilian asked. "If I hate being a vampire forever?"
"Then you hate it forever, and you'll live in conflict," Dante said with a bluntless that was somehow more comforting than false reassurance. "Some never accept it. They spend eternity in resentment. That is your choice to make. No one can force you to be happy with your fate."
The conversation was interrupted by the sound of footsteps approaching the library, and Lucien entered.
"Your new phone," he said, placing the box on the table beside her chair. "Your number, your contacts, all restored. No tracking bugs, no spyware. Just don't mention us or the bite, or your friends become targets."
Lilian looked at the box without touching it. "Thank you," she muttered, feeling wrong as thanking the people who had taken her freedom, but refusing the phone out of spite would only hurt herself.
"You're welcome," Lucien said, perching on the arm of a chair with casual elegance. "It's a start. You're actually listening instead of trying to jump out of windows."
"I'm listening because I don't have a choice," Lilian corrected sharply. "Not because I've accepted this situation or forgiven you for keeping me prisoner."
"Captive," he countered with a slight smirk. "Prisoner implies you've committed a crime. You're just an unfortunate human caught in circumstances beyond your control. There's a difference."
"Tell that to the locked doors and the cameras."
"I will," Lucien chuckled. "That's fine. Be angry as you want, just aim it at the rogue who attacked you, not at the people trying to clean up his mess."
Lilian opened her mouth to argue with a dozen sharp retorts to point out that none of this changed the fact that they were vampires, still monsters, still keeping her here against her will. But exhaustion was starting to catch up with her, the rush from her failed escape attempt fading and leaving a deep tiredness in its place.
"I'm tired," she said instead, turning her gaze to Dante. "Can I go back to my room?"
"Sure," he said at once, rising to his feet. "You should rest. The transformation will be harder if you go into it exhausted. Your body needs every bit of strength it can gather."
He didn't offer to walk her back, which she appreciated. He only gestured toward the library doors in a clear invitation for her to leave whenever she wanted.
Lilian snatched up the phone box and stood on legs that felt shakier than she wanted to admit. The walk back to her room felt longer than it had come here, and within minutes, she had no idea where she was, unable to remember which hallway led her to her room or how to find the grand foyer she had tried to escape through earlier.
Yet every time she stopped at a junction looking confused, one of the vampires would appear. Adrian or Lucien, or sometimes Dante, and silently point her in the right direction before disappearing again. They guided her without making it obvious they were following.
When she finally reached her bedroom and shut the door, Lilian sagged against it with relief. The room now became the only place in the entire estate where she could be alone with her thoughts.
She crossed to the bed and sat down cross legged, opening the phone box. The phone inside was sleek and expensive, far beyond anything she could have afforded on a restaurant servant salary.
The phone powered on, and within seconds after it connected to the WiFi, notification started flooding in. Text messages and missed calls from people asking where she had gone.
Lilian scrolled through the messages, and tapped on Nancy's name first, her best friend since college. The one person she had never been able to fool, no matter how hard she tried.
This was going to be hard.