Prologue
There is a certain comfort that can come from being loved by a dangerous man.
The strangest feeling of security, of safety that can't be attained in any other circumstance, with any other person. It's the incredible power and brutality of their darkness, their reckless destructive impulse, their wicked and violent tendencies, that can surround you in a truly unexpected shroud of pure light.
It's without question the craziest of all paradoxes that I've encountered in my short, yet eventful nineteen years.
Safety in the midst of danger. It shouldn't be possible. The very notion of danger implies fear, uncertainty, anxiety, chaos, and thousands of other debilitating emotional complexes.
But I've felt it myself. I've experienced the unorthodox and vastly inappropriate nature of a darkness that can spawn the most magnificent kind of solace.
Yes I am intimately familiar with this phenomena. I've been the primary focus of such attentions for almost three years now. The singular priority of a man with the most horrific of pasts and the darkest of incentives who loves me more intensely and viciously than any man has ever loved a woman.
My name is Elena Gilbert. I'm a young vampire, living in Mystic Falls, Virginia. My hometown. The site and source of every tragedy that has ever befallen me in just under two decades of life.
And I am the true love of one Damon Salvatore. The eldest of the two Salvatore brothers.
The black sheep. The disappointment. The monster. The Augustine vampire.
The foil in the universe's grand design.
But most importantly, my safety and happiness in this wild supernatural world that I was so unceremoniously thrust into when I was seventeen.
He is a host of twisted and terrible things. He's everything I never wanted, everything I tried so hard to run from, to deny at every turn with every possible excuse.
It was all for naught. I fell in love with him anyway. Despite his flaws, his endless mistakes, his horrible choices. I am just as painfully, powerfully, passionately in love with this man as he is with me.
Which is how we got here in the first place. Because he fell in love with me, and I with him.
Had we never succumbed to the manic, untamable fire that burns between us we would never have wound up in this impossible position.
I would never be standing by this accursed quarry, poised with a stake above his heart, looking into the fathomless oceanic depths of his eyes.
It begs just two questions: how did we get ourselves into such a mess? And what the hell am I going to do to get us out of it?