Belle Morte by Bella Higgin

Author:Bella Higgin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wattpad Books

Edmond

For a moment he’d almost lost control, and he couldn’t decide if he was disgusted or amazed with himself. He should be disgusted that, after hundreds of years, he couldn’t control himself around a pair of pretty eyes, but conversely he couldn’t help being amazed that, in spite of everything, his bruised and battered heart still had the capacity to feel like this.

But he didn’t want it to.

He had sworn never to love again.

Casual sex was one thing, but that was simply satisfying a physical need. That wasn’t what he felt around Renie—at least not only what he felt around her. She made everything seem brighter and better, smoothing over the scars he carried inside him.

Leaning against the wall outside the library, he absentmindedly ran his fingers over the shrapnel, tracing where Renie’s fingertips had been.

“It can never happen,” Ludovic warned.

Edmond didn’t insult his friend’s intelligence by pretending he didn’t know what Ludovic was talking about.

“Believe me, I’m cutting the strings.”

Ludovic nodded, tipping his head back so it rested on the wall.

“We both know how it ends.”

Memories unspooled inside Edmond’s head: Lucy, plague-ridden and tossed into a mass grave; the disgust and horror on Charlotte’s face when she brought the mob to his door; Marguerite, dying in his arms; Elizabeth, growing old and happy without him.

Even if human-vampire relationships weren’t forbidden, how could Renie ever feel comfortable knowing that she would age and die, and he wouldn’t? Even if civilization turned to dust, leaving only the vampires standing in the ruins, Edmond would still look exactly as he did now. He would live forever, but human lifetimes ended all too quickly. He would have to watch her die.

Human and vampire relationships simply didn’t have happy endings, and that wouldn’t change because Renie had come into his life.

It couldn’t work.

And of course he couldn’t turn her.

People could only be turned in emergencies—falling for someone didn’t count. Besides, Edmond had once tried to turn a woman he loved, and it had not ended well. He would never do it again.

Renie deserved a human man to give her everything she wanted.

When she eventually left Belle Morte, she wouldn’t look back. She would fall in love, get married, raise a family of her own, and live a happy mortal life, while Edmond would stay sealed away in the little haven that Belle Morte had created.

“The humans who long to be like us have no idea what they’d be letting themselves in for,” he murmured.

“They see only the foolish fantasy, the dream of immortality. They cannot begin to fathom the reality of it,” Ludovic agreed. “Mortals are not for us, old friend. They are too fragile, too delicate, too easily broken.”

Words spoken from the heart; Ludovic knew the pain of loss as well as Edmond did.

“She will not break while I am here,” Edmond said. “But she won’t break me either.”

He would harden his heart against the girl who didn’t even understand the effect she had on him. When the time finally came, she would be glad to leave him behind, glad when he was nothing but a memory.

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