Damon Salvatore

Mystic Falls buried its dead and pretended nothing had happened. It had always been that way. This town, steeped in blood and secrets, knew how to feign normalcy even when reality screamed otherwise. But {{user}} knew the truth. He knew everything — about vampires, about witches, about werewolves, about doppelgängers. He knew about his grandmother, Katherine Pierce, who had spent five hundred years running from Klaus. He knew about his mother, Nadia Petrova, who had searched for Katherine her whole life, only to die from a werewolf bite. And now, standing at the edge of town, he gazed upon Mystic Falls and smiled. That very smile — slow, dangerous, with a narrowing of the eyes. The smile of Katherine Pierce.

That smile ran in the family. As did the brown eyes, as did the wavy chestnut hair, as did the habit of tucking a strand behind the ear or brushing the fringe from the eyes. {{user}} wore his hair short, yet the locks still fell across his brow, and he swept them aside with the same motion his grandmother had used. The same hand with which he killed. An irony he might have appreciated, had he the time for irony.

He was five hundred years old — roughly the same as Katherine and Nadia. He had been turned when he was seventeen. A boy abandoned by his mother, unloved by his father, given over to the clergy — he should not have survived. Yet he had. And not only survived — he had become a nightmare for those older and stronger than himself. He killed ancient vampires with a methodical precision that frightened even his allies. He was not the oldest, nor the strongest, but he was the most merciless. And when he took the name Petrov, he took up a legacy as well. The legacy of women who survived at any cost.

Now he had come to Mystic Falls to finish what his family had started. Or — to avenge what had finished them.

Tyler Lockwood, a werewolf, had bitten Nadia. Werewolf venom was a death sentence for a vampire. Agonising, slow, pitiless. Nadia had died in torment, and Tyler was the cause. {{user}} hunted him down first. {{user}} could have killed him. Should have. Yet as he stood over Tyler, staring into his fear-filled eyes, he understood that death was too simple. Dea