Stefan had brought her home on a Thursday.

A fortnight before All Hallows Eve, and only three days after Stefan's discharge from the Mystic Fall's intensive care unit, where his brother had been jabbed, prodded and monitored, physically and mentally for seven days. And exactly one month prior to Damon tricking her, injecting her full of vervain and chaining her in the dank basement.

That's where she is right now. Gnawing for their deaths, he suspects.

Damon taps his fingers on the crystal glass, the amber liquid rippling with each beat. He licks his thumb and slides it across the corner of a dry page. He's in his father's old office, feet up on the oak desk, drink in hand while reading over his father's leather-bound journals.

Apparently Giuseppe had been tracking her over the span of 20 years. Indirectly for most of the pursuit Damon figures because he can't remember his father's fist being far from his temple for more than a week. Her intimate day-to-day and whereabouts are documented in faint scribble-scratch, evidence of her existence sent to him through other hunters Damon supposes, a world-wide web of men and women with the same birthright as himself.

He is two stories above the basement floor, so he can't hear her, but as he observes dust, illuminated and floating over the floor lamps, like apparitions hovering in the corners of his father's book-lined office, he concentrates solely on the soft tap of his finger pads on the glass of bourbon, and envisions her. Expensive black riding boots scuffling over the dirty cement from her seated position, dark curls shrouding her apple cheeks and heart-shaped face, the coiled ends stiff with dried blood. Her caramel arms, smudged with earth and grime, cuffed in metal, and suspended over her head in chain links. Her green eyes are surely closed, shut tight, along with her mouth as she plots and waits for him to come to her.

He can't hear her, but he can hear Stefan, who is locked away in his own bedroom, his door heavily padlocked on the outside. His younger sibling is finally awake from being drugged and carried away so as to not to intervene in his premeditated capture of the vampire.

Stefan is hammering on the wood, yelling, 'Goddamn you Damon.'

Damon rolls his eyes, leisurely removing his feet from the desk, sipping his drink as he saunters down the hall. His brother has been mostly asleep for the ten hours he's been trapped in his room and Damon is considering letting him out, and driving him over to his ex-girlfriend's house to dry out and cool off from any notions of trying to retaliate. And he stands on the other side of Stefan's door and pulls at the lock, ready to free him but Stefan's muffled roars come through the wood, 'Let her out, Damon, let her out,' and Damon drops the lock, shaking his head.

That was his brother; the boy could have all the cards stacked against him, and just when he could save his self with an Ace, he trades it to help another.

"No can do, brother" he snorts, staring down the hallway and the many gilded portraits of Salvatores, "Don't forget who you are," he says, leaving the door and the shouts of his brother.

"She's not like the others."

"Fucking sap," he mumbles to himself, quickly stepping down the staircase, thinking that his brother would fall in love with a vampire.

And how would he know if she is unlike the other bloodsuckers. He has never hunted. He had just started training on how to subdue their kind when their old man was murdered. He had no personal reference of what vampires were capable of other than war stories from their drunken father and ancient textbooks. She is the first vampire his baby bro has ever encountered, the first gorgeous nightmare, which makes Damon think Stefan's attachment to the vamp is even sappier.

The basement door creaks, and Damon stands at the top of the rickety stairwell, inhaling the damp mildewed air, eyes dilating to the dark and his skin prickling from the silence below and the possibility that she has freed herself.

Squaring his shoulders, he makes a face for even thinking she could lift her head from all the vervain, let alone rip off her chains.

He quickly flips a light switch and a bulb buzzes, and he walks down the stairs and bangs on the metal, rattling her cage, "Wake up, Bon-Bon," he spouts nicknames for her at the top of his head. "How's my petite mort," he cruelly jokes, and glances through the grate, narrowing his eyes to detect the slightest movement, and frowns at her crumpled form.

His heartbeat quickens as he thinks over the likelihood of a vampire dying from the amount of poison he pumped into her, and he tightens his jaw, and kicks the door for her attention, but she remains slumped, and he says her name, "Bonnie?"

Her name echoes in his mind, over the past thirty-one days of him saying her name thirty-one different ways, and the lack of shock in her green eyes when he jabbed the needle into her side, and how she held on to his shoulders and leaned into his arms as if she expected it.

Damon turns the key and swings open the prison door.

And Damon has to agree with his brother that Bonnie Bennett is unlike the others, but not because of some bullshit like being harmless or compassionate, but because she's alive.

He has slain every single vampire he has come in contact with in the ten years he's earned the honor of his familial vocation. And the fact that he hasn't driven a stake through her un-beating heart has kept Damon up pacing the floors at night.

Damon crouches to the ground, mere feet from the vampire, and angles his head down to peer at her face but it's hidden behind her dark hair. He extends his arm, lifting a curtain of tendrils from her face, and her lashes flutter, but they do not open. She's broken. And He furrows his brow, cupping her cold cheek and he opens his mouth to utter a mess of words, and her eyes flash open, vibrant green irises startling him, and she no longer looks broken but collected, and his brain registers that her wrists aren't bound by metal cuffs anymore, and in the breath it takes his face to show fear, she has her canines embedded so deep into his neck that he is rendered speechless from the scraping of her teeth on his vocal cords.

Slurping and growling, she suckles his blood, tugging at his veins, moaning, and when she unclasps her mouth from his neck there is a gelatinous popping sound and his head colliding to the floor.

She appears on her feet, her steps light and quick, like a feline, and he watches her from his supine position, the back of his head flat on the concrete, watching her straddle him and finally align her body on top of his. She caresses his cheek with the back of her freshly warmed hand, stretching her wide mouth into a bloody smile.

"Do you see your mother, Damon?" she asks him, pointing for him to look over at the far right corner of the cell, and she looks down at him and up again, "Or your father?" She questions with a raised brow."Humans speak of seeing their ancestors when they are dying."

His heart beat slows into a dirge and his breaths are quick and shallow.

"And make no mistake, my beautiful hunter. You are dying, "she coos, her tepid hand stroking his brow. She kisses his forehead, leaving a bloody imprint of her full lips, and whispers into his ear, "You should have killed me, Damon."

And as he lay dying, collapsed in her arms, he wished he had.