While history may suggest that I ran out of luck the day I collapsed nearly five years before, I found myself quite lucky not ten months into my assassination mission. Not lucky in that I was alone with the king or doing anything productive by way of killing him. No, I was lucky because the girl--that perfect, perfect girl with her near-perfect mask--caught my gaze once again during a ball. And this time she held it. I had her attention.

I had no idea what we were celebrating, and to be completely honest, I didn't feel like catering and cleaning up after the rich pricks while they danced and ate an abundance of food with no concern for the suffering outside their ivory world. If I wanted anything that night, it was to shove a pork chop down the throat of the next lady who laughed. Death by pork chop. It's how I would have wanted to go.

That's not the point. I got off topic. Point is, I hadn't wanted to go to the ball, but the second she held my gaze from across the room, I couldn't think of anywhere else I wanted to be. I stopped moving, the tray of fancy foods I could never learn to pronounce teetering dangerously in my unconcerned fingers. She stared, just for a moment, before I lost her in the crowd once more.

"Who are you?" I whispered, oblivious to the glares from the aristocrats around me. Every other thought I had blew from my mind in a matter of seconds. I wanted to know who she was. I wanted to know why she smiled so perfectly to hide her emotions, why no one else seemed to notice the lifelessness behind her eyes, why she always found me in a room full of people. Why I felt so drawn to her and all her mystery, like a moth to a flame. She was the shining moment in a terrible evening yet again, a candle in the abyss that is my existence. A beautiful distraction from the horror I was soon to commit.

... Shut up, I'm a vampire, I'm allowed to be a romantic.