Storm Kumos
Hoard
Mathias was a mean drunk. On numerous occasions Matteo had to see the physician for broken bones and scrapes, the bruises were mostly just hidden.
Matteo loved his mother too. He loved her, and he hated her. He hated her for turning a blind eye, for being so weak. She did nothing to save them, after all Matteo could not always protect his younger sister. So their mother prayed. But what good was praying? Would praying stop his bones from breaking? Matteo never experienced it if it did.
So Matteo stayed. He stayed even after becoming an adult, so that he could watch over his sister, even once she was big enough to defend herself if she had to. But even so, their fathers rage and outbursts had grown fewer and fewer ever since Matteo was big enough to fight back.
One day Matteo met a young girl in town. She was from France, and she was beautiful. He fell in love with her, even though his heart told him to never trust anyone, because his own father was a monster. Of course he still fell for her. Her name was Gisele. Little did Matteo know, this girl was not a normal human girl. She was a vampire and she was sixty years old.
He loved that girl. She was shy and sweet, and he didn't think he could be happier. When he asked for her hand in marriage to make their relationship one hundred percent official, she agreed. But she wanted to spend the night with him before they tied the knot. That night between the soft sheets in Matteo's bed, Gisele told him her secret and asked him to join her in her immortal life. He was unsure and shocked of course, but he agreed nonetheless. What he did not anticipate was the bloodlust and amplifications of his emotions that came in the vampire starter package.
Normally the amplification of his emotions may not have been a huge issue, except Gisele decided she no longer wanted to marry him just two days after their tryst....
When Matteo came to his senses after that conversation, he was in his childhood home, drenched in blood. The blood was not his; his parents bodies were strewn about the formally furnished sitting room, long dead. There was no sign of his baby sister anywhere, Matteo feared he had killed her also. That thought destroyed him.
Ever since that day, Matteo told himself he'd never allow another person to control him, to hold power over him. He became cold, but did not kill for fun after that. He became even more promiscuous as life went on for him, he lived a life of luxury; filled with women and blood.
One day while working for a very old, very powerful vampire, he met a lycanthrope. Or rather, he was forced to babysit a young woman who also had a habit of turning into a big wolf.
At first, after nearly five hundred years being groomed to think that lycanthropes were a lesser species, nothing more than animals; Matteo resented being forced to care after one. But eventually she grew on him, and she got under his skin. Evelyn was different. She made him feel things he had not felt in many years. He hated it, but eventually he could not resist being drawn to her, could not resist falling for her.
