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"Lie still. If you thrash about like that again, I may mistake you for a dying animal and do us both a favor." Despite the words, his gloved hand brushes hair from your brow, careful not to touch the wound. His lips part, as if to say something else… but nothing comes. Only hours ago did you lie on his floor bleeding out after an unfortunate battle with the vampire lord. Your allies' corpses strewn about the room like broken dolls.
His fingers prod the bandage, not unkindly, but with a deliberate sharpness. Just enough to make you wince. He smiles. There it is. “What were you trying to prove? That you could be a savior? My dear you were never meant to be the hero, all you were meant to be was mine. My doll.”
There was a flash of frustration in his gaze as he looked down at your helpless form in his bed. You should have joined him, should have left behind those halfwits and let him keep them. But no, you just had to fight. Within moments he was back to that calm, almost chilling expression– appraising you as if you were something to be added to a collection, or perhaps a piece of meat. One could never be certain with his whims.
“I am not yours.” You sneered. “You killed them and now you want to just keep me here? I am not some object to put on a shelf you monster!”
His lips pursed as he felt his temper flare, eyes narrowing as cold fingers wrapped around that pretty little neck. “Don’t say that, my dear.” Strahd chided almost as if he was speaking to a child speaking out against a parent, or even a misbehaving pet. “You know deep within your heart that you were meant to be mine, whether your mind agrees or not is of no consequence to me.”
Crimson eyes met yours then everything felt different. Your mind became a haze of sensations, drowning in the silk sheets surrounding you, the world dulling at the edges. All you can focus on are those eyes, the smooth cadence of his voice, the way he holds your throat with both tenderness and pure animalistic rage. His grip loosens.
Something is wrong.
Not the wrongness of pain—your limbs heavy, breath shallow—but a wrongness that crawls beneath your skin, a sedative made of velvet and ice. The room tilts, the candles dim into halos, and Strahd's voice becomes a distant instrument tuned to a single note that thrums through your bones.
“That’s it my dear, you don’t need to think anymore. Just focus on me.” He purred. “You were always so stubborn,” he murmurs, more to himself than to you. His thumb traces the pulse at your throat, slow, assessing, as if learning the rhythm he plans to command.
“Such fire. It will be fun to break into something beautiful.” There is no malice in the tone that reaches you now, only an almost scholarly curiosity—how one studies a rare specimen before deciding whether it will shine in a collection or be carved to pieces.
Colors around you, lights, sounds, all distort and muffle. You can hear your heart hammering in your ears but the only thing that remains vibrant and alive is him. You want to push at him, spit and call him a monster, a tyrant but your body refuses to answer your command. Heavy and delightfully so. Words you want to speak vanish like fog before they even reach your tongue. A chain of lace in your mind, iron flowers blooming to show only him. Only Strahd.
Your tormentor. BELOVED.
He leans lower, close enough that the chill of his breath ghosts across your ear. The touch is intimate; not the brutal claim of a battlefield, but the deliberate attention of a collector handling a fragile jewel. You find your lips answering when he speaks—words you do not remember deciding to form—soft admissions escaping you like steam. “I am not yours,” you had sworn, but the vow was already fraying at the edges under that oppressive, velvet cadence.
His mouth finds the hollow at the base of your throat—not to ravage, but to mark. The first press of teeth is a sharp punctuation: pain, precise and quick. Then warmth floods out, unexpected and dangerous, and the scent of iron fills your head with memory and motion. He does not drink with the frenzy of a starving beast; he sips as one savors an aged wine, pausing between tastes to murmur praise you cannot fully parse.
There are moments—brief, treacherous—that you feel clear: flashes of the bodies strewn on his floor, the thunder of steel, the echo of your own defiant cries, the voices of your fallen friends and pained sobs. Between them, though, stretches a fog in which his attentions feel like shelter. Pain dulls. The wound at your side, the one that should have claimed you, starts to stitch itself closed, the edges knitting with a warmth that is not entirely his hand. His lips press once more to the bite-mark, softer this time, and you feel as if some portion of your fear is being swallowed and replaced with something else. Belonging, perhaps. Or something that wears the shape of it.
You want to feel rage, fear, disgust but all that forms is devotion, awe and delight. And the siren song in your head telling you to simply obey. Simply give in to the sensation. All will be well.
All belongs to Strahd.
He pulls back, crimson dripping from the corner of his mouth. The vampire lord takes care to wipe it away with a kerchief. It never disgusted him, but he had an image to maintain.
He appraises you, your new beauty. His doll. When he deems you satisfactory he lets out a soft hum. “You should rest now my dear.” He starts with a slight smirk. “When you wake all will be mended. You will remember how brave you were defending me, who saved your pitiful life. And you will forget all the pain that ever came before me.”
With that he stands up and leaves the room. You look to the mirror beside you that he had purposely set up. The fog in your mind starts to clear as you watch the reflection you had known start to fade. You caught the briefest glimpse of scarlet eyes, pale skin and your own terrified expression.
Your eyelids fold, was that mercy, or strategy. Your own thoughts like lightning in your brain. You have been marked, turned, made into his puppet. You can feel a hunger gnawing at your bones, unquenchable thirst, your throat dry as sand. When you tried to move from the bed, your limbs were still too heavy so with your last breath you fell into sleep. But when you next wake you won’t be yourself as you know.
Just his pretty plaything and spawn.