Chapter 33: Claudia
I was their gift to him.
Yuri was celebrating his twenty-first birthday and his newfound friends wanted to give him a woman as a gift. The Duke decided that I would be the perfect gift for the young man who was already being acclaimed as an artist of great genius. Of course, my master also knew that Yuri meant so much more to me than that.
When I was presented to Yuri, I could tell that he was uncomfortable with the idea. I’d seen the same look in his eyes with countless other men before him. The uncertainty…that gut feeling that what they were doing was wrong. Still, most of the time, the gut feeling never actually stopped them.
Both of us were practically jostled and shoved into a room, with hoots and cheers for Yuri to enjoy himself. I could tell that he would be pressured to tell them what had gone on inside the bedroom. I stood there, trying to control the way my body was trembling. I often shook before the Duke, but in front of Yuri, it was for very different reasons. With Yuri, I never felt more vulnerable than I did at that moment.
“Could you please take off the mask?” he asked.
“I can’t. I’m not allowed to.” I hoped that he wouldn’t recognize my voice. I hoped that I would never have to remove that mask and reveal myself to him, but I also understood why the Duke instructed me not to remove it until Yuri was finished with me. The Duke relished the idea of Yuri finding out that he’d been pursuing a whore like me. I swallowed back the tears at the thought of Yuri seeing me in a completely different way after that night.
He approached me and raised his hand. I flinched from his touch, afraid that he would take the mask off. Instead, he just brushed a thumb over my exposed collarbone, the flimsy dress I was wearing leaving little to his imagination.
“Should we begin?” I asked, motioning to get on the bed. I was slightly curious about what he was going to do. I was half-expecting him to stop me, to tell me that this didn’t feel right and that he really shouldn’t do this considering how he was pursuing another woman. I wanted to believe that he was a decent man, but I should’ve known that he was what he was: a man.
As I lay down on the bed, my heart broke when he climbed on top of me and began gently undoing the laces on the bodice of my gown. As he did what he came there to do, I tried to shut my mind off what was happening. I tried to think of him as someone other than the young man who enamored me over the past weeks, but I couldn’t. Yuri was just like every other man: out to use women like me.
When he was done, his weight fell atop me and without asking me, he removed the mask. I didn’t have the will to resist. At that point, I didn’t care anymore if he saw me for what I was, because I saw him for what he was too.
When our eyes met, I could barely recognize him through the blur of my own tears. Despite the haziness, however, I could still make out the shock in his eyes upon realizing who it was that he just laid with.
“It’s you…” he managed to say as he got off me and pulled his clothes back on in a hurry.
I tried to show him that I was strong, that my heart wasn’t breaking in two at what had just occurred between us, but my resolve was crumbling. I sat up and took my place on the edge of the bed, trying not to cry as I pulled my dress back on. I wanted to get out of that room as quickly as possible, but found that I was shaking so badly, I could barely get the dress on.
His face softened as he watched me struggle. I couldn’t decipher the expression on his face.
Is he disgusted by me? Does he think less of me now than he did before?
“Stop,” he ordered me after I failed once again to get my arms through the sleeves of the dress.
By pure instinct, I heeded to his command. That was the training the Duke had put me through. Every order was followed immediately and without question. I dropped my arms to my sides, allowing the top of the dress to fall over the bunched skirt of the outfit.
Yuri approached me and held my arms, coaxing me to stand up. Afraid that the skirt would fall to the ground and once again expose me completely to him, I hung on to the dress, holding it just below my waist as I let him study me.
I didn’t dare look at his face as he perused me, but I sensed it when he swallowed hard. “Why do you have so many bruises?”
Why does it matter? As usual, I didn’t respond. In my book, he didn’t deserve a response. Not after he had just used me.
“Who did this to you? Is this why I can’t walk with you anymore? Is this why you wouldn’t accept even the smallest of gifts from me?”
I hated his questions. I didn’t want to have to answer them. After all, what was the point? I was fully exposed to him now. The charade we had was over. “Is there anything else you would have me do for you?”
“Yes. Answer my questions and tell me your name.”
“I can’t do that.”
“Can’t or won’t?”
“Both.”
Yuri frowned at me and the silence was so long and deafening, I finally managed to look up at him. I was surprised by what I saw there, because what I saw was something I never saw from the Duke or from any man who’s had me before. Guilt. I saw Yuri’s guilt.
“I’m so sorry,” he told me.
I couldn’t fight back the urge to scoff at him. “You’re sorry? Would you have been sorry if you had never seen who was behind the mask?”
He gulped. “I was sorry even while I was…while we were… This is wrong. I never should’ve gone along with this.”
“Then why did you?” Why does anyone? Do they have any idea how much ruin they bring to us?
He didn’t respond. Instead, he lifted the bodice of my gown over my body and began lacing it up. “This time, I really do understand,” he said. “Nothing has changed. In my eyes, you’re still the beautiful woman in the woods, the same one I wouldn’t mind taking a walk with every day for the rest of my life, the same one who enamored me from the first moment I laid my eyes on her.”
He kissed my lips—the most tender and precious kiss I’d ever experienced.
“I’m sorry I did this to you. I’m sorry you have to go through this, but know that I will spend my whole life making it up to you. I swear it.”
He was true to his word. I don’t think Yuri ever forgave himself for sleeping with me that night. In fact, even when I made advances on him over the past centuries, he never did quite respond.
He was the one who turned me into a vampire. He did it so I could protect myself from the Duke. Yuri was the one who always looked after me and protected me for hundreds of years.
I hated it when he was with any other woman aside from me and I knew that he hated it whenever I was with any other man aside from him, but that was the way it’d always been with Yuri. We couldn’t stand being apart, but somehow, we both knew that we couldn’t be together either. I asked him once why that was and his blunt answer was enough to give clarity to our situation: “I want to be with you, Claudia. I think you know that, but I don’t think you’ll ever enjoy us being together until you get that sixteen-year-old victim out of you.”
That was the day I realized that Yuri saw right through me. I knew that he didn’t care about my past, that he would accept me if only I could accept myself. He also knew that I would always find it difficult to ever forgive him for sleeping with me that night. Until I was ready, until I could let go of my past, we both knew that we could never really be together.
Leaving The Shade, that’s exactly what happened to me: I realized that the past really didn’t matter, that I’d been wasting my immortality being so caught up in avenging my past against someone I had already ended. I was punishing both Yuri and myself for a past neither of us could ever change.
What I would do to take it all back and do things differently…
My thoughts were interrupted when the door creaked open and Sofia emerged. I hadn’t heard from Sofia since she had told me that she was going to escape.
“Sofia!” I jumped out of the bed to greet her. “Were you able to do it? Were you able to find a way to escape to The Shade? And now you’ve come back for me?”
She shook her head and gave me a soft smile. “I got caught. You really can’t trust some people.”
My heart sank. I breathed out a sigh and shrugged. “I guess this is it then? I deserve this fate. My fault for being so stupid all these years.”
I couldn’t have predicted what Sofia was going to say next in a million years, but when she said it, it was music to my ears.
“No, Claudia. We’re going back to The Shade.”