❝I want to be with you. It is as simple,and as complicated as that.❞

✧

Kai Park had been born twice.

Once on a bittersweet morning, the wind whipping past the window and shaking its frame, the sound louder than his little lungs could wail. His body grew warmer as his mother's fell colder.

Now that he was older, Kai understood what his father meant when he said that Kai was a parasitic infant. Small, needy, clearly no regard for others as he took his mother's life in a selfish act- just so he could live his own.

The second time was on a lazy afternoon.

Kai's gums had been aching. Silas, his older brother, said that it was fine, and that the boy was probably just hungry. His appetite seemed to be nonstop and forever growing, though he himself had yet to see a growth spurt in years.

After gnawing and chewing on whatever was left inside the fridge, a foul taste entered his mouth. His brother had said he was just hungry, yet the bathroom mirror told another story.

There, he saw his mouth was bleeding but slivers of white were undeniably present against the red blood pooling in every open crevice. Fangs were beginning to protrude from his gums, filling in the once blank space.

This moment in time was marked into Kai’s brain, engrained within his deepest memories, never to be forgotten. It had been nine years since that new life had taken Kai by storm- yet he felt no fear or reluctance to change.

Instead, he found the boy in the coffee shop a few blocks away from his home much more frightening.

How could Kai allow someone he didn't even know make him feel these things? Butterflies were swirling in his stomach, begging to fly from his throat - yet underneath that, there was another primal hunger that Kai Park was sure only Castel Sanchez could fulfill.