Royal of Darkness

Previously

…My gaze drifted to the heavy oak doors, the only barrier between me and the outside world. A world where I could disappear, where I could shed the suffocating weight of Thorne Manor and the unsettling intensity of Valerius. Safety. It was a siren song, a whisper of normalcy that promised an end to the gnawing fear and the bewildering fascination that had taken root within me. But then, my thoughts turned to Valerius. To the way his eyes, dark as a moonless night, would soften when they landed on me, a fleeting vulnerability that contradicted the iron will he projected. To the almost imperceptible tremor in his hands when