"She craved his twisted darkness, the same way he grasped at the light in her shattered soul."
Natalie Gilbert has spent her entire life putting everyone else's needs before her own. So much so, that it ended up costing her the one person she couldn...
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NATALIE
It only took a few weeks before things began to truly fall apart.
There wasn't a moment in time that I could pinpoint exactly where our relationship had shifted or Kol's attitude towards me changed, all I knew was that it had.
Drastically.
After convincing him that my desperate show of force at the festival was simply a freak accident brought on by adrenaline and the panicked thought of Tyler body-jumping him under six tons of concrete, things seemingly went back to normal.
Well as normal as things could get at least.
The crisis of Klaus and his personal vendetta against the unsired hybrids had passed. Hayley's betrayal almost a distant memory as the town moved on with the mourning of Mayor Lockwood.
I hadn't spent enough time around her to know anything other than that she was Tyler's mom, and the judgemental woman who looked down her nose at anyone she deemed unworthy.
In fact, I had always resented her for the way she let Tyler's dad smack him around, turning a blind eye to his blatant emotional and physical abuse, just so she could throw her parties, and flaunt her wealth and privilege poorly disguised as events for charity.
Apparently, only some of those things had changed when she found out about Tyler's werewolf curse, but now it didn't even matter.
The night of the festival,while Kol and I had fled after the attack, apparently Klaus had gone on to finally ruin the last piece of Tyler's human life he had left. Drowning his mother in a public fountain, and then relishing as the entire town was fed the ridiculous story of an "accident" that seemed to hinge on the bottomless martini glass that woman had always carried around.
I had gone home a few days later, fully expecting an team of my friends to be sitting in my living room, ready to call an intervention for me, and it was only when Elena had told me about Tyler's mom did I understand.
I didn't know if Tyler had miraculously decided to spare me by not telling anyone about Kol and I, or if he simply had forgotten amidst his grief. A subject I knew way too much about. But either way after a few weeks, the fear of retaliation against Kol, and the anxiety about my standing within the group began to lift.
Things almost felt perfect, despite the lingering presence of Klaus, plus Stefan and Damon's insatiable need for the Cure.
I spent most of my time with Kol. Magically cloaked in his room, just in case any other members of his murderous family decided to barge in. I had Damon covering for me almost every day now, bouncing between excuses.
With Elena practically planted in the Salvatore mansion, it was quite easy to convince her that I was either alone at our house, or up at the cabin, watching over Jeremy and his vampire training.
