Before The Ravens Sing (✔️, EDITING)

Chapter 33: Confessions In The Dark

Damian's POV

Love is a pain that is endless. No matter how amazing your life might seem at any given time, love had the ability inject itself into your pores and turn the tides on everything. I never imagined myself falling in love, not because I believed that I was incapable of human attachments, but more so, because I had witnessed how poisonous love could be. 

I watched love become a poison that coursed through my family's veins. We always justified our actions as being done out of love. If hurting others to get revenge or right some perceived wrong that someone had done to you, meant that your intentions were loving, then you could keep love far away from me.

When I first laid eyes on Talia Grey, I felt love slowly begin to breach my surface. Those chocolate eyes seemed to bore right through the years of defenses that I had built up, like tiny hammers chipping away at the surface of concrete walls. I knew the minute that I laid eyes on her in that elevator, that I needed to stay away from her. There was something about her that drew me in closer, like being stuck in the ocean and getting your foot caught in the current. No matter how hard I attempted to swim away from the current of her gaze, each simple flutter of her eyelashes or snide remark in my direction gripped my flailing toes and dragged me down further.

When I was younger, my parents weren't what you would classify as nurturing. I didn't have fond memories about my mother tucking me in at night, kissing my forehead and reading me fairytales about princes and everlasting love. My parents taught us manners, rules and obligations. The only stories we were told, were ones about our lineage and the mythology surrounding our people.

I was raised to be a warrior; a vicious boy, who would grow into an unrelenting king. I was raised to do right by my family and uphold the traditions set in place from centuries ago. I was never little Damian Grayson Reever, fun loving or happy boy; a boy who would grow into a loving and kind man, with the world at their fingertips.

I was raised to be a man that people would fear and cower in front of.  I was raised to be a direct reflection of the men whom had come before me; the kings who surrounded themselves with blood.

The only fairytales that I was told when I was younger, came in the form of a petite Scandinavian nanny, Birgit, who at almost seventy years old, always had a kind word for the two boys that she cared for. Had it not been for kind Birgit, I would never had known how to love Talia Grey.

When I laid eyes on Talia and foresaw all of the myths surrounding our family possibly becoming true, I felt a pang of fear in my gut. I felt fear, because for once in my life, I would be expected to be the man I knew I was capable of, but he was a man that was foreign to myself. She saw through my family and my defenses; she saw into my soul.

Birgit used to read me a Hans Christian Anderson fairytale, entitled The Leaf from the Sky. In it, an angel, who was high up in the clear sky, was clutching a flower which he had gotten from a heavenly garden. While up high, he pressed his lips to the flower, causing a leaf to break away and descend down to the soft soil below. The leaf took root in the soil and grew all around; clutching onto nearby plants, essentially overtaking everything. The plants around that were native to the soil, despised the foreign entity and attempted to make their distaste known. Through the difficult seasons the leaf and its resulting flowers overcame and embraced the new surroundings, causing a beauty to radiate around.

Although despised and misunderstood, it took a pure of heart little girl to gaze upon the flower and see the sheer beauty that radiated from it. She plucked a single leaf from the flower, as to not harm or kill the beautiful thing in front of her, and kept it in her worn Bible. The leaf remained green and new, even until a few weeks later when that beautiful little girl succumbed to death and laid in her death shroud, with the small Bible under her head.