Vampire Queen

Chapter one

I was born on the sixteenth of May 1401, in a small village, far in the south of the kingdom of Toska. My mother and I lived in a small house by the sea. Every morning we collected seashells at low tide. I had a happy childhood despite all the circumstances.

My mother raised me alone. I never knew my father and she never talked about him. Mother worked on a pearl farm. She worked hard every day. She was opening the shells in which the pearls grew. The rarest were black pearls. But they all belonged to the king. You were not allowed to keep them under penalty of death. Nobody knew why, why they were so precious.

We didn't have much money. We lived from day to day. I didn't have an education because we couldn't afford it. As soon as I was old enough, I was just eight, I started working on a pearl farm with my mother. It was hard but honest work. Despite the fact that we often had nothing to eat, we were happy.

Once my mother found a black pearl. She kept it even though it was forbidden. She was strong and fearless. She strung it on an ordinary thread and tied it around my neck.

"Keep it always with near your heart, Dragomira," she told me. "Even though we are not among the nobility and do not rule the kingdom, it does not mean that we are any less than them."

It was a present for my tenth birthday. I had to wear it hidden under my clothes, but I never gave it up. It was my little show of defiance that no one knew about.

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One day, in the dead of night, a magnificent carriage, which even the king would not be ashamed of, stopped by our modest house. My mother and I were just about to go to bed when we heard the neighing of horses. My mother ordered me to wait inside, in the bedroom, but I couldn't resist watching them from the window.

A man dressed in expensive fabrics got out of a carriage pulled by six horses. He seemed young, couldn't have been more than thirty. My mother had horror written on her face when she saw him.

"What are you doing here, Ivan?" she asked the classy man with poison on his tongue.

She must have known him well when she addressed him so intimately. The nobility hates when you do not address them, my lord, my lady.

"You know why I'm here," the unknown man replied in the same tone.

They must have known each other really well.

"You don't even come near her," said the mother forcefully. "After all these years, you have no right to."

"I'm her father," the man argued. "You took her away from me. You had no right to do it."

My heart stopped for a moment. My father? I couldn't believe those words. I couldn't catch my breath. How could my mother hide this from me? Why? Why did she lie?

"She doesn't even know you exist," my mother countered. "I told her you are dead."

"You weren't far from the truth as you well know." the corner of his lips lifted into a wicked smirk.

"As I said before, you don't get close to her. She thinks you're dead, and I'd like it to stay that way," emphasized the mother.

"You think I don't know what day it is?" he let the question hang in the air. "Maybe you managed to hide from me all these years, but that ends here and now. I have come to get my daughter back and I am also bringing gifts."

"You won't turn her into the same monster as you are," said my mother freaking out.

"It used to not bother you," said the man, my father.

"Used to," said my mother.

The classy man, my father, moved towards my mother. In the blink of an eye, he was standing next to her and holding her by the neck. I held my breath.