a/n: first full length katherine fic. i would really appreciate it if you review before you favorite (excuse the presumption). warning for precision f bomb. thanks and enjoy!

but still, like dust, I'll rise

Fill me from the crown to the toe top-full

Of direst cruelty. Make thick my blood;

Stop up the access and passage to remorse

That no compunctious visitings of nature

Shake my fell purpose.

(WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, MACBETH)

You may write me down in history

With your bitter, twisted lies

You may trod me in the very dirt

But still, like dust, I'll rise

(MAYA ANGELOU, STILL I RISE)

The boy loves with his whole soul, and by God, it's going to be the death of him.

Katherine Pierce, contrary to popular belief, is capable of that mythic poetry and instigator of wars. But if it's one thing that she has learnt over half a millennium of running and fear and blood, it's that unconditional love should only be reserved for oneself, that epic declarations of ardour are only for martyrs.

Katherine Pierce is not a martyr. She has no desire to die.

ACT I: BEAUTY

"Be brave, daughter," her mother says to her upon her departure. "Be brave, my sweet."

It is a cold morning. The mists cloy, thick and white and physical around her skirts, and Katerina tries her best to smile. It is a pitiful thing. She pulls her hood over her hair, and tries very hard not to cry.

"Goodbye, my love." Her mother says, pulling her into a hug. Katerina's mother smells of bread and milk and a good-hearted wife but Katerina, for the moment, at least, smells of sin and another man's sweat. Perhaps that is why the villagers shy away from the soiled darling. "I love you. Remember that."

Later, her mother fades into the white of the mists and Katerina presses her fingers, very lightly, against the glass of her window, traces the shape of her mother through the pale hush of her own breath.

Her mother fades into the distance, and there is a whisper of a death, an end, in the air.

There is a girl with her for the journey westwards, a girl named Anne with hair gold like wheat fields and eyes like cornflowers, a true English rose, orphaned for the last seven years by the war in England.

"Lord," Anne says now, drawing the word out long, so that her red lips purse and curl at the same time, and Katerina tries again, her tongue thick in her mouth, but still she cannot master the word.

"Lord," Anne repeats, and leans forward. Beneath them, the carriage rocks over uneven ground, and outside the dark trees shimmer with borrowed light. "Lord, Kat. You must say the word as you bow, as you demure. Lower your eyes, like this," Anne demonstrates, her dark gold lashes brushing heavily against the rise of her rosy cheeks. "You must say the word as though you are born to it. Arch your voice. You must seem a lady."

"Lord," Katerina tries again, and her tongue curls too easily, curls the r in the word until it is nothing but bastardized Bulgarian. Her hands grip, knocking hard against her heavy skirts. "Lord. Lord, lord, lord."

Her fingers dig red crescents into the palm of her hands, and her breath hitches. Her teeth knock hard against one another in her mouth, and the word comes out a hiss. "Lord Elijah. Lord Niklaus." She slips back into Bulgarian. "Shall they take the place of my father then? Shall they beat me when they please?"

Anne shakes her head. "Patience, Kat." She says. "No man likes a woman who answers back."

Katerina does not say what is on her mind, does not think, Nichola liked it well enough. He used to laugh at my retorts before he looked at me like a man.

And how did it turn out for you that time?

Left on her back like a common whore, bearing a man's bastard child. Her own father spat in her face and refused to look her in the eyes. Her mother had wept.

"Lord," Katerina tries again, closes her eyes, and lets the word roll over her tongue like the wine her father used to allow her at the dinner table. It is just as bitter and just as old. "My Lord."

England is a broken land.

This is what she gathers when she first sets foot upon this country she was never meant to see, this land she was never meant to touch. Her feet touch the ground and she breathes in deep, the air cold and still all around her.

There is no life here, is what she thinks when she follows her stern chaperone into the vast sprawling estates of the Lords Niklaus and Elijah. The woods all around them are oddly silent, the birds do not chirp and the insects do not hum. Katerina strains herself, and hears no hint of living beings.

"Where are they?" She asks, and her voice is impossibly loud in this circle of silence. "Where are the lords?"

"Hush, child." Her chaperone, a mean-faced woman with stern lips and tired eyes says in Bulgarian. "Did you really expect two noble lords to greet a lowly disgraced girl such as yourself in person? You are but a charity case."

"Attending the king, I've heard." Anne whispers to her. "Both of them backed the Tudor king during the War, and were allowed to keep their estates. Even the estates of their neighbours, rumour has it." Anne grins. "The timing was almost magical."

Katerina turns her head up, her eyes tracing the tall spires, the thick grey walls of the manor's exterior. There is something foreboding about the manor, more than a hundred times larger than her family's modest estate, its windows snug with Venetian glass, and walls heavy with frost.

"My Lady!" A voice calls out, and Katerina starts. It is English, English to the bone, the words long and drawn out and thoughtless. Her own feigned accent seems pale and weak in contrast. She looks up.

The boy is tall, and grins with his teeth, his long dark hair falling around his angular face in straight layers, and Katerina braces herself. She knows the role she is meant to play. She bows.

And holds.

And remains silent, like a good woman.

The boy reaches for her hand, clumsy and young, and his fingers are strangely cold to the touch. He grins from ear to ear. "Trevor, my lady. I'm a personal servant of the Lord Elijah. I've been charged of settling you in before they arrive."

His eyes are not innocent. Not as innocent as his smile, and perhaps this is what makes Katerina tilt her head, smooth and sinuous, so that he may see the curve of her long neck beneath her furs.

This will not be like the last. Katerina thinks she can use some allies, someone to trust.

She feels, more than sees, the boy's breath catch.

The gown hugs, in all the right places, falls at all the right lengths.

She observes herself in the polished bronze looking glass—a thing that can feed her family for months, truth be told. It had been imported from Rome, her lofty maid had said with a quirk of those pale eyebrows. From Lord Niklaus's other abode.

Far above the likes of you, the girl's curled lips had hissed, silent.

Katerina brushes an idle hand across the line of her dress, watches the fall of her dark hair against the burgundy of the velvet, thick and lush and it is a matron's dress—wouldn't want the village whore to parade around in cloth-of-gold—but it is smooth against her bare legs beneath, smooth against the skin of her breasts. When she curves her lips, all she sees is sin.

"Katerina Petrova," she says out loud, and is startled by the way the name rolls off her tongue, like fine wine, like a sigh, like so much unspoken want. This is a woman's name. Katerina Petrova is a girl with a woman's name, a name to be sung in verse, a name to be whispered by lovers in the blue dark.

The name lingers in her mouth still, made entirely of caught breaths.

The door opens behind her, and Anne is there suddenly, breaking through her reverie. "It is time." She says, the light catching on the blue of her gown.

Katerina's lips curl, wry. "To meet my maker?"

Anne smiles. "One can only hope."

The man stops and starts and simply just stares.

"Hello," she intones, in the voice of an innocent, a line taught to her on many hard winter nights, draws out the sound so it is long and smooth and English.

He is handsome, the man, in the stern, cold ways of the East, eyes darker than her own and a mouth that one can easily imagine pressed close to the beads of a rosary. His voice, too, when it comes, belongs to the dark side of a confessional.

(A man who expects things of her, that is what she thinks. A man who might whisper her name like a chant and hold her to be what she is not.)

Elijah, Trevor says, and Katerina starts. He even has the name of a prophet, a name to be worshipped by other men, a name to be murmured as a blessing. She bows, and smiles, and says, "My Lord."

Her hand in his is impossibly small, impossibly fragile in the sure grip of a man who looks a priest, and his eyes have not wavered, they have not drifted, instead he pins her down with that gaze, and holds her hand as though she will float away. "You remind me of someone."

"Do I?" Katerina says, and feels something pull and rip within her own ribs.

This is how it starts.

Klaus is a thunderstorm. A creature of epics and verse, a man upon his very own odyssey, about to brave winds and rain and storms for a home, a patiently waiting vassal he hints of in smiles and words that do not quite make their way from his tongue. He holds his cards close to his chest, but Katerina knows men like him, knows the gamblers at the edges of her village. He will bet everything and anything upon the slightest chance, if he desired it enough.

And Klaus, oh, Klaus is a man who desires the world.

Elijah is the eye of this storm. He is calm and he is collected and there is no hunger in his eyes, but an endless wait. At odd times Katerina catches him watching her, when she is engrossed in a book in the vast library—she is teaching herself how to read, you see—and suddenly there is a prickling at the back of her neck, a shiver not entirely unpleasant, and when she looks up, he will be across the room, bottom lip caught between his teeth, watching her as if she is a phantom, as if she is altogether unreal. It makes her breath catch, that gaze. It makes her wonder if he is seeing her at all, instead of a long dead girl with an unknown name.

"Is Petrarch truly so riveting?" He asks one afternoon, the smallest smile playing on his lips. "I had no idea my brother was fostering such a scholar."

She laughs. "Obviously not, my Lord. I have not touched your histories."

He nears her, and without thought, Katerina sits up straighter, to be better on guard. Elijah's eyes sweep downward, and if he sees her movement, he does not comment upon it.

"Come outside," he says.

Elijah gives chase like a man who does not want to catch his prey. He is not a lion, not like his brother. He does not play to win, but rather to further the moment.

"If we cease to believe in love—" Katerina asks now, and it is a thing she has never voiced out loud. It is a thing that lives in her despite it all. Her voice catches—never returned, that is the thing. It was never returned.

A mistake anyone could have made, she tells herself now.

"—why would we want to live?"

Love is a thing to be conquered, by steel and an iron will, a thing to be chased over land and sea, a thing to hold close to your heart on winter nights, so that it may keep you warm. Katerina cannot fathom anyone being loved the way she wants to be loved without having first fought for it.

Elijah smiles at her, a torn broken thing, drawn from his mouth like a grimace.

(Five hundred years later, and she will still boast, no matter the untruth, that she had been the only doppelganger to make him feel.)

"What does he want from me?" Katerina asks him one night, when Klaus is on one of his regular trips into the country.

He is writing a letter, and she stares at the ink blotches on the skin of his finger where the quill presses too hard. He is so still she thinks he might have been carved from stone.

"What do you think he wants from you?"

"Elijah," she says. "Don't play with me."

A silence, and she is afraid that she may have pressed too far, too fast. Elijah's lips quirk, and he sets down his quill. There is no light in his eyes when he looks at her.

"He wants to feed you and clothe you," he says finally, softly. "He wants to court you and treasure you."

(He wants to beat you and cuff you. He wants to slit your throat and spill your blood over a moonstone half a millennia old.

This is the lie she does not forgive.)

She smiles, stands, and what she says next should have been nothing but a joke. It comes out quiet.

"Do you want to court me?" She asks him.

Elijah's mouth opens on a word unspoken, and she tilts her head, watches him struggle for an answer.

"I would not dare," he smiles, finally. "Is my brother not enough, Katerina?"

(This is the lie she does not forget.)

Afterwards, he kisses her hard, grips her tight around her shoulders until she fears she might break.

She listens to his breath hitch beside her ear, does not protest when he clutches at her like a drowning man with his nails digging into her skin.

"It is a full moon tomorrow night," he says.

When she runs, her blood is beating quick and firm in her veins, and her heart jumps between the cage of her ribs, so hard and fast she is sure she shall burst—

I will not die, she thinks. Not today.

It beats behind her ears, fills her eyes with biting sweat, and there is something bitter rising in the back of her throat, something that shall surely rise and send her falling to her knees, and they shall catch her, they shall catch her and tear out her throat and she will die Katerina Petrova, village whore, worthless scrap of a girl, the means to an end whose face isn't even her own—

I will not die.

Not today.

Katerina bets everything she has upon this slight chance, and begins to hold her cards close.

Here is the thing:

You can have anything you want, so long as you desire it enough.

And Katerina, oh, Katerina is a girl who desires only to live.

ACT II: THE BEAST

She changes her name when Elizabeth becomes queen.

The name is all hard lips and hard curls of the tongue, a name she can use and it no longer ends on a breath, the Katerina no longer defined by the Petrova at the end.

Katherine Pierce, she says to herself. Katherine Pierce, Katherine Pierce, Katherine Pierce.

She repeats the name to herself until it does not seem a lie anymore. Katerina Petrova becomes Katherine Pierce, a monster with a woman's name.

(I am doing you a kindness, she wants to say, her hands falling from Damon's face, and he looks at her like such a little boy still, such a child, those great blue eyes uncomprehending.

You should thank me, Katherine thinks, purses her lips to shatter his heart some more, but this final cruelty she cannot bring herself to perform. She cannot quite smile. I am teaching you how to survive, Damon. Don't break. You can't afford to break.

She is continuing her lessons from 1864 as she murmurs the words, easy, swimming in her mouth until it seems almost a truth. She is ending this hundred and forty five year old obsession of his. She will crush it like hope if she must; will crush it into dust, into ash, until it is the mere remnants of a purer time, floating in the wind—

He does not have the same eyes, that much is true. They are not dark, but instead as blue as a clear sky, but still—

He looks at her like he expects things of her, this is what she knows. He whispers her name like a chant and holds her to be what she is not, what she never had been. Katherine Pierce is a woman who cannot bear a pedestal. She cannot sit and pose for him, cannot let him paw at her feet as though she is a saint, cannot let him worship her. There is simply too much blood on her hands for her to bless him.

He wants her to love him as he loves her, that much she knows. He wants her to love him completely, unconditionally, without reserve. He has destroyed himself and crafted himself into a monster for this. She cannot bear his weight.

Cut me loose, she thinks now. Let me go.

There it is, then, the coup-de-grace—

"It was always Stefan." She says, and makes the child a man.)

She smells death on him.

Katherine Pierce grins with her teeth and quirks an eyebrow, eyes falling indolently oh the older Salvatore lounging in Confederate grey, and that smile, oh, God, that smile—

Katherine feels her world lurch. He is the perfect culmination of the two brothers who killed her and crafted her out of blood and fire and an ancient curse. He has the honesty of Elijah's eyes, but that smile is all Klaus, all fanged, predatory charm.

I will break you, little boy, she thinks. I will rip you apart.

Damon has scars Katherine will never have.

When she bites into his throat she can taste the battlefield inside him, bright and metal and cold and sharp. She can taste the edge of his bayonet and the bite of a bullet, the man he killed from across the field and the friend he smothered with a pillow for want of morphine. She tastes it all, and it is a burgeoning darkness whispering within his soul that she longs to set free.

Human life means nothing, is the underlying truth that she murmurs against his skin. Humanity is nothing. A skin you shall be glad to shed.

"And what is the lesson?" She asks coyly from atop him, her skirts bunched up on either side of her hips as she traces his hunting knife idly across the skin of his chest, bright beads of blood in its wake. "Careful, Mr Salvatore. Wrong answer means a penalty."

His breath catches on a laugh. She presses the knife in deeper, but he does not flinch.

He looks up at her, those blue eyes bright and shining, brimming with youth. For a moment Katherine feels unspeakably old, unspeakably dead.

"I will not die." He says. "Not today."

Her hands stop, her grip light on the hilt of the knife, its cold blade pressed easy against Damon's cheek.

I can slit your throat so easily, she thinks then. A great red smile, just for you.

There is no fear in his eyes. He stares up at her, calm, a child. A pupil at the feet of his teacher, thinking he is about to be rewarded for a good answer. Katherine's hands still, her lip caught between her teeth. She brushes an errant curl off his face.

Herself, she does not remember what it is like to live without fear.

(She can love him so easily, that is the thing. Control is a thing she has worked three hundred years for, her narcissism is a cultured art, but that dark want—that girl who once whispered why would we want to live?—is still there, beneath the surface, waiting to pull her down and drown her in the depths.

This is a weakness she cannot allow. She will not make the same mistake twice.)

She closes up the knife easily, sliding it's blade against the palm of her hand until her thick dark blood comes rushing through. She closes her hand into a tight fist and lets it drip drip drip into Damon's mouth.

"No," she murmurs softly. "You won't."

"I love you," he whispers to her in the blue dark, her legs wrapped tight around him, his breath catching in the curls of her hair. "I love you, Katherine."

Katerina, she wants to say. My name is Katerina. And you, Damon Salvatore, love a girl who doesn't exist.

Her teeth flash in the dark. She bites.

I touch your skin, and I know that you're an angel.

Katherine's lips part.

She needs no saving in his eyes. She is an angel come down to earth, to bless him and kiss him and rescue him from the morbid grey of this world, but he expects nothing of her. He expects nothing of her and when he loves, it doesn't hurt. He doesn't love her with his whole soul and his whole heart and his love has its limits, and oh, God, with him Katherine can breathe, she isn't closed in by all the limitations of a limitless love—

"You've surprised me, that's all." She says, and it is the truth. He does not have Klaus's cut of jaw or glint of gold but he wants her within limitations and that is something Katherine has allowed herself to forget in the haze of Damon's love. That is something she does not need to run from. Love with its limits is the only kind that does not threaten.

I have fought my own dragons, she thinks. I have won my own war.

I won't have another boy trying to be my knight.

Later, Damon asks her:

"Is my love not enough?"

Is my brother not enough for you?

She pulls his hands from her face and tells him to leave.

(In 1864 Damon Salvatore is a boy with a crook to his grin and eyes that still shine. On the night of August the 14th, he pushes a girl to a tree with a torch in his hand and thinks, Katherine, Katherine, Miss Katherine—

It's her. It's her, it's her, it'll always be her.

"I won't feed you," she says to him, her lips curling and coy, and Damon remembers a line from a book, whispered aloud beneath an army blanket to the light of a flame as outside the sounds of cannons roared—

Hubris. That was it.

That's not it at all, he thinks. It's not pride. For Damon Salvatore, it'll never be pride.

"If you want it," she says, murmurs, and there is a new edge to her voice, a new kind of hardness. "Take it."

Fatalism comes in many shades. For Damon Salvatore that shade is love.

The world hums around them and Damon thinks, an eternity, an eternity with Katherine.

He thinks, Katherine, Katherine, Katherine. He thinks, out of the crumbling South. He thinks, you, you. Always, always, you.

"I choose you, Katherine." He says.

More than a hundred years later, he stares down at a girl with the same face, and says—

"I will always choose you."

Damon Salvatore makes a promise this time. Damon Salvatore makes a promise to the girl with the face of her crueller, harder ancestor and this time, this time Damon Salvatore thinks, please, please.

This time Damon Salvatore thinks, I will save you.

In his mind, Katherine Pierce rolls her eyes and says, oh, please. In his mind, Katherine Pierce grins and taunts, that white knight complex will ruin you. In his mind, Katherine Pierce smiles slow and says, careful, Damon—she's more like me than you'll like to think.

"That's the Petrova curse for you," Katherine tells him once, afterwards. "You're exactly like Stefan. You're falling in love with me all over again."

She purses her lips when he doesn't reply. "I taught you not to love like this." She says. "You didn't learn your lesson at all.")

When she looks at him, she isn't sure whether she is seeing herself, or Elijah, or a long dead boy with shining eyes and a grin that spreads too wide and too earnest, too fast.

"Did you want to save me, is that it?" She asks him in a lilting tone, and she isn't sure to whom she is speaking. "Damon Salvatore—rushing to poor little Katherine's rescue." She laughs, circles him.

She will leave soon. Team Salvatore is floundering, like fish out of water, unsure and unplanned and untested, and by God, Katherine is not going down with them. Her love has limits, and the horizon is fast approaching.

Klaus will die. He has to. She will sell her own soul for the pleasure of looking into his eyes as he takes his last breath and wheezes his last words but no matter—she'll sell out the Salvatores in a second for the reassuring news of it.

"My hero," she murmurs, drawing a finger across his chest, and chuckles. "Is that what you wanted to hear, Mr Salvatore? Did you want to carry me out of the tomb yourself? Feed me some blood from the neck of some girl? And when I woke up, did you think I was going to fall into your arms and we'd ride off into the sunset?"

I love you. Is that what you wanted to hear, Elijah?

Did you want to carry me out of that ring of fire yourself?

Be the first person I'll see after death?

And when I woke up, did you think you were going to finally be the hero of your own story?

I win my own wars, Katherine thinks. I write my own story. I may be a Petrova, but I am not your maiden.

She laughs in his face, feels his chest tighten beneath her hand. She leans in close.

"Salvatore as in saviour, right?"

In a flash he has her against the wall, the edge of the panelled bookcase pressed deep into her back, and she thinks, easy, easy, Damon. She thinks, good boy.

"Don't for one second," he hisses to her, soft and hard and wanting, almost like a caress, those blue eyes bright and oh, yes, she likes this Damon. It is like looking into a mirror. "Think that I won't kill you. I will rip you limb from limb and I'll smile to do it, Katherine. Now do us both a favour and shut the fuck up."

She smiles, hooks her foot around his knee, and breaks his leg without so much as blinking.

"I'm older than you, boy," she whispers to him, driving an elbow into his back, severing his spine. "I'm stronger than you. Don't for one second think that we're on equal footing, Damon."

She does not finish the thought, but he knows it, just the same.

We never were.

"You learnt my lessons well." She says to him. "Except one."

He laughs, wheezes out a breath. "Oh?"

There is a pause. Katherine touches her tongue to her lip. "My dull-as-dishwater doppelganger is going to ruin you, Damon. She'll destroy you."

"Then I'll be destroyed." He says. "Then I'll die."

She turns away. "I taught you that too," she calls over her shoulder.

Not today, Damon, or did you forget?

This is the thing that kills her about him:

He could have been brilliant. He had been the perfect student, the perfect reflection, save for that one facet.

The boy loves with his whole soul. Katherine expressly told him not to do that.

ACT III: AND EVERYTHING IN BETWEEN

Klaus dies with his sister's name at his lips.

Katherine wasn't there, of course. She hears it from the girl with her face, twenty years later, still young and girlish but oh-so-tired, sitting in a café, the ghosts of two brothers between them.

Damon dies for Stefan, in the end.

He chooses his brother. Damon Salvatore dies with his brother's name in his mouth and Elena Gilbert in his heart, but his eyes, his eyes—his eyes see only a crueller mutation of the doppelganger's smile.

Damon's fatalisms come in the form of love. This time, though, Katherine cannot quite blame him.

She wonders if she might have done the same, if any of her family remained.

Katherine survives, though. Katherine carries on.

(Over time, Elena learns to do the same.)

"I thought you loved Stefan best," Elena Gilbert says to her, a hundred years after Klaus, after Mystic Falls, after Katherine gains her freedom.

They are in a hotel room overlooking the Grand Canal in Venice, and Katherine blows smoke rings into the dark night, heavy with human pollution, nonchalant and unmoving. Elena has her bag in her lap and her hands on her wallet.

Inside there is a picture of a boy a hundred years dead, with hair like the night and eyes like the brightest Mediterranean sea. He is clothed in Confederate grey and grins with his teeth, and she stops when her doppelganger murmurs his name. Katherine Pierce flicks her cigarette over into the dirty canal.

"I thought we've established that I don't care what you think," Katherine says lazily, her heeled boots clicking together on the balcony—her feet are never bare, even if the rest of her is. Katherine doesn't have to run anymore, but she is always ready.

"But you came back for Stefan." Elena says. "You loved him more than Damon. You've said so."

She is such a girl still, Katherine thinks. Tell me, Saint Elena, since when have I ever told the truth?

"So did you," Katherine says dully. It's not her fault. Petrovas always fall for the younger brothers, the ones that don't try to save them. Maybe that's a curse in itself. "Did you choose him because I did, Elena? Tell me, when you told Damon it was always going to be Stefan, were you thinking of me?"

Elena Gilbert says nothing, and Katherine Pierce smiles, two reflections meeting at the wrong angles.

Silence is an art; Katherine has taught her on more than one occasion. Love has its limits.

So far, Elena Gilbert has been a better student than Damon Salvatore. It's the Petrova in her. That is testified to by the fact that she is still alive.

Idly, she pulls another cigarette out of the carton in her jacket and lights it. "Besides," she says, thinking of blue eyes and a quick smile and a wit to match her own. "It doesn't matter anymore, does it?"

"You're never going to love anyone the same again." Elena says quietly, and Katherine isn't sure to whom her doppelganger is speaking, isn't sure whether she should rip out the girl's throat or pour her a drink. Instead Katherine settles by letting out a long stream of white smoke, watching it fade into thin air. "Not like you loved him."

She isn't sure which him the girl is referring to, either.

The brother with the blue eyes and the easy grin or the brother with the quiet voice and the ink-stained fingers. Katherine isn't sure, Katherine doesn't know.

"You'll get over it," Katherine says. "I did."

(She knew where you were, Damon. She didn't care.)

This is the truth of it:

In 1987 Stefan was at a concert in Chicago, but in 1963 Damon was in a crowd in Dallas, Texas.

In In 1972 Stefan was in Vietnam, but in 2001 Damon was on the streets of New York.

In 1937 Stefan was living in Austria, but in 1964 Damon was standing in a forest clearing in Mystic Falls, watching the door of a tomb.

She had been watching him. She was invisible and still and she did not so much as breathe, and was sure he could sense the scent of her hair and the curl of her body and so she sits, silent.

Silence is an art.

He had made his way to the door of the tomb, pressed his hands hard and tight against the stone, and seemed for a moment sure to press hard enough that it would crack.

Finally he had stopped, and there had been a sheen of sweat on his brow, his breath trapped and ragged and desperate in his mouth, his tongue curled against his top lip, a name caught in tatters in the single space of that sigh.

Katerina Petrova almost broke there, almost stepped out.

Katherine Pierce left.