Everything in me hurt. If only this were real. How many times over the centuries had I wished our love for each other were as simple as this? As simple as a mother’s soft approval, as firelight on our faces as we kissed by a hearth, as a thousand tiny pleasures and kindnesses adding up to an entirely ordinary love story? But our love story was not like that. It was blood and pain and death, an awful cycle doomed always to repeat.
