Prologue
Prologue
What Matthew Tyrell witnessed not only shattered his heart into billions of pieces but also drove him to the brink of insanity. The agony stung deadlier than a thousand scorpions, burning his blood with hellish flames. It broke his soul and annihilated the existence he once knew.
His two sons—Matt Burdock Tyrell, seven years old, and Nicolas Burdock Tyrell, five years old—were butchered before his very eyes. He saw the life drain from their bodies, watched their blood pool like a cruel offering to the night. Their cries were cut short, their final gasps swallowed by the darkness.
This is not real, he tried to convince himself. It can’t be real. But the pain—the damn pain that scourged his very soul—reminded him otherwise. He wished this nightmare would just end already. But his children’s death was only the beginning of his anguish.
He watched helplessly as the murderer of his children, a ravishing beauty with long, straight, deeply dark hair, clothed in silky, revealing silver garments that clung to her voluptuous figure, latched her right palm around his severely injured wife Nicola Burdock Tyrell’s neck, lifting her from the living room floor as if she were a lifeless doll.
Matthew fell to his knees, tears pouring, heart bleeding as he pleaded and begged for her life until his voice was hoarse, until breath itself abandoned him. But the she-beast did not care. Her lips curled in cruel amusement. With effortless malice, she snapped Nicola’s neck as if it were brittle glass. The sickening crack split the air, louder than the thunder that rumbled beyond those cursed walls.
And with it, the last piece of his heart was obliterated. Nothing mattered anymore. His reason for living was gone. Now all he wished for was death.
When she turned her gaze on him, fingers curling around his throat, lifting him like he weighed nothing, he thought—yes, this is it. He would be reunited with them. But fate was crueler than he ever imagined. She did not grant him the mercy of death. She didn’t put him out of misery. Instead, she turned him.
She dragged him into her cursed existence, forcing him to become the very monster that had destroyed everything he held dear. It was a fate worse than death.
He tried over and over again to end his own suffering. But he would not die. Not by blade. Not by fire. Not by poison, nor drowning, nor any other desperate method he could think of. Every wound healed. Every death denied. The universe mocked him.
It condemned and trapped him.
So Matthew did the only thing left to do. He decided to take vengeance on the monster who had cast him into this world of pain and shame.
For the past three hundred years, he scoured every corner of the earth, searching for the creature that stole his life, his love, his humanity. He burned through ancient records. He walked the ruins of kingdoms that had crumbled under time. He tracked whispers of monsters, interrogated the damned, spilled blood in the name of vengeance.
But still—no trace of her. Not even a whisper of her existence. It was as if she had vanished.
And his vengeance remained just out of reach.
Even so, the fire still burns within him. He will not stop until that creature suffers as he did—before he plucks her out of existence.
