Prologue
She had always been breathtakingly beautiful. But now, she was no longer his, and that simple, brutal fact consumed him. It gnawed at him, invaded every thought, an ache he couldn’t shake no matter how he tried. What he had once possessed—her beauty, her presence—now belonged to someone else, slipping through his fingers like sand, leaving only emptiness. It was a hollow, unrelenting pain, one that flared every time he saw her, every time he thought of her. Losing her was more than losing a person; he’d lost the life they could have had, and somehow, he’d lost himself in the process.
The engagement had felt inevitable, perfectly scripted. They were the Blacks, after all—pureblood aristocrats bound by tradition, bound by the demands of family legacy. And he, as the heir to the ancient House of Black, was expected to marry someone who fit the family’s rigid mold. Narcissa, had been flawless in their eyes, a young, beautiful prize that was never meant to slip away. The Blacks had always been players in a merciless game, pushing pieces into place for the sake of blood and power. To the outside world, they’d been the ideal match, an engagement that seemed destined, even obvious. But deep down, he’d never fully believed in it; there had always been a part of him that resisted the thought of being bound to her—or at least that’s what he had told himself.
He didn’t understand why, but Narcissa haunted him, weaving herself into his thoughts, his dreams, his every moment. Her absence was a shadow that followed him, clinging to him. The Black family had made it a point to keep distance between blood relatives, and in their cold calculation, they’d managed to keep him from developing any genuine closeness with her. Yet, maybe that distance was exactly what fed his desire, a dark, twisted fascination that had grown stronger the more he tried to suppress it. Perhaps this forbidden desire was inevitable, lurking somewhere within the Blacks’ shared curse, where unspeakable secrets and repressed emotions festered beneath the surface.
In so many ways, she was unlike him, an otherworldly beauty among shadows. Narcissa didn’t even look like a Black, not the way Sirius did. Her blonde hair and clear, serene blue eyes were an anomaly in their dark lineage, a striking contrast to his own black curls and storm-gray gaze. She was everything he wasn’t—light, purity, serenity—and the very sight of her, as perfect and pristine as marble, drove him mad. He, a creature of darkness, and she, an ethereal angel.
It felt like fate, a sick and twisted kind. She was the angel, and by god, he was made to sin. They had always existed in parallel, drawn together yet always apart, and now that she was beyond his reach, he felt an all-consuming obsession grow inside him. She was everything he could never truly have, everything he craved with a desperation he could never voice. The angel and the devil, forever intertwined, forever separated. The thought of her, of what they might have been, became his own private torment—a longing that would never release him, a wound that would never heal.