From the Journal of Elion Karsis
Unsent. Written in the margin of a burned ledger.
I do not say I love you to Soraya.
Not because it is untrue, but because truth spoken carelessly becomes a lie I can hide behind.
What I feel for her is not clean. It does not arrive gently. It does not ask permission. It comes with a weight in my chest and a heat behind my eyes, and always—always—that familiar pressure I have come to call the beast in me. I have learned not to pretend otherwise. Pretending is how men like Dracula rule.
Soraya sees the beast.
She does not flinch. She does not ask me to civilize it or disguise it as virtue. She looks at it the way one looks at a storm—measuring distance, direction, and cost—and then chooses to stand where it cannot pretend to be something else.
That choice unsettles me more than resistance ever could.
I took her heart the way I take territory: deliberately, without illusion. I did not seduce her with promises of safety or redemption. I did not offer a future. I offered alignment. I offered truth without anesthesia. And she accepted—not because she was weak, but because she recognized the same fracture in herself.
Still, I question what I am doing.
When I am with her, the beast quiets. Not gone—never gone—but contained. Focused. As if her presence gives it edges instead of appetite. This should comfort me. Instead, it terrifies me.
Because I do not know if I love her…
or if I love the way she lets me wound the world without turning away.
There are moments—quiet ones—when I wonder if what I am conquering is not her body or her loyalty, but Dracula himself. If every night she chooses me is another proof that his Night does not own all that it shaped. If loving her is simply another way to break him behind closed doors.
This thought disgusts me.
Soraya is not a weapon. She is not a victory condition. She is not a symbol. And yet, my mind—trained to reduce everything to outcome—keeps circling the same question:
If I did not need to end the Night, would I still choose her?
I think I would.
She is loyal to me, but not submissive. She sees me, but does not absolve me. She settles the beast not by obedience, but by presence. She does what I ask not because I demand it, but because she understands the shape of what I am and does not mistake it for a promise.
This is why I never return the words when she says them.
Because if I speak them aloud, I might begin to believe they redeem me.
They do not.
I love her the way I love finality—
with devotion, with violence restrained only by purpose,
and with the constant fear that what steadies me
is also the last thing I deserve.
If the Night falls and I survive it,
I do not know what she will be to me.
But if I do not survive,
I know exactly what she was:
The one place where the beast did not need to lie.