The Vampire's Human Wife

Episode 1

Luciana Moretti, aged eighty-seven, stood at the floor-to-ceiling window of her penthouse, a crystal glass of the world’s most expensive wine held loosely in her hand. The city glittered below her, a tapestry of cold, distant lights. She took a slow, deliberate sip, savoring the rich vintage as it slid down her throat, and released a sigh that seemed to carry the weight of decades.

Her gaze drifted to the elegant cover of the novel resting on the console beside her—Unhappy Wife. The story, a bestseller, followed a young woman named Laura Petro, sold by her family into a marriage with a powerful, handsome, dreadfully wealthy vampire and his two insufferable twin sons. Laura, of course, despised them all. Her heart belonged to a simple, kind-hearted baron. According to the plot, the vampire and his brats met gruesome, timely ends, freeing Laura to wed her true love and live happily ever after.

“Balderdash,” Luciana murmured, her lips twisting in a frown. She took another defiant sip. Her doctors had forbidden alcohol, but she was going to die of something. Her personal motto, a twist on the old adage, came to mind: What doesn’t kill you makes you fatter.It had served her well.

She was Luciana Moretti, once a titan of Italian commerce—rich, beautiful, and formidably sensual. She had carved her empire from nothing. Yet, her long life stretched behind her like a gallery of beautifully framed failures, each one a marriage. The core issue was always the same: she could not bear children. Men, she learned—through stinging, repeated lessons—might pretend otherwise, but they always, alwayswanted a woman who could give them heirs. “Love you no matter what” was a pretty lie, exposed every time by the eventual discovery of a fertile mistress. Luciana had been left with palaces, portfolios, and a soul-deep conviction forged in the fires of betrayal.

“Love,” she said to the silent, opulent room, her voice scraped thin by old pain. “A pretty fantasy humans invented to make the misery more palatable.” She had believed in it once. She had been shown, with brutal clarity, how useless that belief was. Love did not exist.

A sudden, vicious pain speared through her chest. The crystal glass slipped from her fingers, shattering on the marble floor with a sound like a gunshot. Dizziness swamped her, the glittering city lights blurring into streaks.

So, this is it,she thought, a strange, bitter taste flooding her mouth. My finale.She had put her affairs in perfect order. Her so-called family—vultures who saw her only as a bottomless purse—would find nothing. Every lira, every property, every stock was willed to foundations for orphans, sick children, and the terminally ill. Let her nieces and nephews with their surgically enhanced curves actually work for a change. Let them sweat.

A faint, triumphant smile touched Luciana’s lips as her legs gave way. She collapsed onto the plush, divinely expensive silk of her sofa, the last breath leaving her body in a soft, final sigh, swallowed by the indifferent glow of the city she had once owned.