[before episode 1.1]

January 13, 2009

ENZO HAD spoken to me every day since New Year's Eve. We didn't speak a lot, but he had started to tell me a little bit more about himself and the information he had on vampires and the Augustine society.

I didn't know much of anything he was talking about, but I found myself fascinated by everything he was saying. Especially when he spoke about how he had been held prisoner by my ancestors and other doctors for 65 years now.

Trust me, Enzo had to do a lot of explaining on that one.

However, I'd started to come to terms with it a little more. Sure, the guy was supposedly a 132 year old vampire who somehow connected his mind to mine during a particularly brutal experiment. Didn't that happen to all the best FMCs in my romantasy novels though?

I was doing my best to take it all in stride, but I knew I would need to get more proof of what Enzo was saying before I fully got on board with all of this. He was right, that night at the Founder'd New Year's Eve party: I needed to prove to myself that I wasn't crazy.

"Good morning, Margot."

I slowly pushed myself up onto my elbows and blinked blearily against the light filtering in through my sheer curtains.

Not being one who loved to speak first thing in the morning, I threw up a half-hearted peace sign to acknowledge him and then flopped back against my bed. Maybe just five more minutes, I thought to myself, slowly starting to drift my eyes closed and—

"You're going to be late to school, gorgeous."

"I'm awake, I'm awake," I said and snapped back up to a seated position.

Rubbing my hands over my face, I tried to fight through the exhaustion weighing heavy on my limbs to drag myself out of bed. Slowly, I trudged over to my record player to put on the song I'd been listening to the night before with Enzo: Sugar Sugar by the Archies. He'd said he liked the song, but I could tell by his tone that he wasn't being completely truthful.

"Maybe you could put on the Billie Holiday record again?" Enzo suggested, and I bit my cheek to hide my smug smile.

I knew it.

"Sure."

I paused the record player and swapped out The Archies record for the Billie Holiday one. Enzo told me Billie Holiday was quite popular before he was taken prisoner, so that music reminded him of freedom now.

Lately, I've been playing music almost constantly so that I could talk to Enzo without anyone overhearing me. Mom and dad were already hovering enough, so I didn't need to give them more ammo by eavesdropping on me talking to an empty room.

"Do you think the oversized jeans with the pink flowers would be too much to wear today?" I asked Enzo as I looked through my jewelry and picked out a pair of big, silver hoop earrings.

"You look lovely in everything you wear, Margot."

I beamed. "Thanks."

After I got ready for the day in a fitted, plain white top that I tucked into the aforementioned jeans, I sat with my back against my bed's headboard with my laptop resting on my jean-clad legs.

"What should I look up today?" I asked Enzo.

I hoped he might have another idea of how to investigate the situation without drawing too much attention to himself specifically. He said that they'd removed fingernails for much less than this. Talking to the daughter of one of his enslavers was likely one of his worst ideas, but as he'd told me repeatedly, I was the only one he could see.

I was his only hope.

"Look up Damon Salvatore, but not here."

I furrowed my eyebrows and looked up. Luckily, Enzo had gotten quite good at reading my facial expressions, so I no longer needed to rush to explain my confusion.

"You'll need to go to the library and look through the town history section."

"Who is he?" I slowly closed my laptop. "Is he another doctor?"

"He's the vampire who left me here to burn alive."

My blood ran cold, and I began rubbing at my shivering arms as a result. "That's awful. I'm so sorry. Is he—is he a bad vampire then?"

"Darling," his gentle voice sighed, "all of us are bad vampires. It is only you I wish to protect, and only you that I care for."

"And my loved ones," I added, indignantly crossing my arms. "Right?"

"Right."

"Margot! Come down for breakfast please!" mom yelled up the stairs. I flinched much harder at her voice than I did at Enzo's voice these days. He'd started to feel like a much more natural part of my awareness too, so his interjections and comments didn't really frighten me anymore.

"I'll try to go after school," I promised Enzo. I hurried to my closet and fished out my pink doc martens and a matching pink sweater and hurried to shut off the record player. Under my breath, I added, "And I hope they go easy on you today."

**********

One of the greatest things about Caroline Forbes was how little concern she had about what shady things I was doing, especially if it involved photos of hot guys. Today was no different.

I had apologized profusely to her when I explained that I needed to go to the library on lunch, and she just tagged along, happy to eat the antipasto salad she bought while I did what I needed to.

"I was thinking of trying my luck with Tyler Lockwood, since he's so hot," Caroline whispered around her mouthful of lettuce and salami, "but I heard rumors that he's dating that skeeze, Vicki Donovan."

"Caroline." I shot her a disapproving look.

"What?" She threw her hands up and accidentally flung a bit of lettuce from her fork. "It's true. The girl has slept with half our class at this point."

"That's what the rumors say," I pointed out, trying to stay focused on the stack of Mystic Falls history books I'd plucked off the shelves. "It's not like you wouldn't do the same if you had the chance anyway."

Caroline pouted and crossed her arms. "Are you calling me a skeeze?"

"No, of course not!"

"Sh!" the librarian hissed.

Caroline and I both winced in sync. I turned back to my best friend and resumed whispering, "I just meant to say that if we had the opportunity to date all the guys we've had things for, we'd earn the same reputation. Plus, you don't even know if she's slept with any of her boyfriends—that's sort of presumptuous."

"Well, I wouldn't need to have all these crushes if a guy would simply like me back though," Caroline pouted.

"You're preaching to the choir."

Caroline huffed and slumped back against her seat and took another aggressive bite of her salad. I took her new silence as an opportunity to dive back into the book in front of me. So far, I hadn't been able to find anything about Damon Salvatore, and Enzo had been unhelpfully silent all day, which sadly, probably meant that he was having a hard day with the doctors.

He didn't watch me much during the torture sessions as it was usually a bit harder to focus on me, and he never spoke when they were around. Every time he disappeared like this, I re-swore to myself that I'd get him out of there as soon as I could.

But first, I had to find him, and it was proving to be a lot harder than I thought.

How could I even begin to figure out where he could be when all Enzo had ever seen is the inside of a cell and torture rooms? Nothing like that existed anywhere I'd ever been, and I had nothing else to go off of. Most days, I felt like I was feeling around in the dark for something I would never find.

I sighed and flicked through more pages of the dense history book on the founding families, taking particular interest in the Forbes and Gilbert sections but trying to not get too distracted by them. I figured I could come back and read more another day if I was really that curious about my family history.

However, just as I had started to slump in my seat, mentally crossing off another failed book, I flipped to a page titled: "The Salvatores," and my breath hitched in my throat.

"I found it," I whispered to no one in particular. "I actually found it."

I dropped the heavy book on the counter, ignoring the librarian's nagging and Caroline's perplexed stare, and began to read every word with marked interest. If Enzo could see me now, I hoped he felt the same glimmer of hope that I did.

It was one step closer to proving my sanity to myself.

And one step closer to freeing him.

The Salvatores were real.

"That librarian is going to kill us," Caroline grumbled. "She literally looks like she could kill you, and like, probably enjoy it. Did you know there are people out there like that?"

I scrunched my nose up in disgust and shot her a sidelong glance. "Ew, Caroline."

She rolled her eyes. "Whatever. What are you even reading?"

She scooted her chair closer, finally taking notice of what I was doing, and widened her eyes on the grainy, black and white photo of a guy with dark hair that I hadn't had a chance to look at yet. "I'm sorry, but who is that?"

Caroline dragged the book closer to herself, and I protested in a whispered yell, "Hey! Give that back!"

"Hello, Damon Salvatore," she hummed to herself, holding the heavy book up to her face. "If only this guy didn't die like a hundred years ago. He was so hot."

At the familiar name, I quickly wrestled the book from her hands and set the book back down on the table, reading at a furious pace.

The Salvatores were another influential family in the founding of Mystic Falls. Giuseppe Salvatore was the head of the household at the time of the town's foundation in 1860.

Giuseppe was married to Lillian Salvatore, who died of tuberculosis in 1858, never seeing the founding of the town. Giuseppe and Lillian had two beloved sons: Damon and Stefan Salvatore.

Unfortunately, Lillian's remaining family members all passed in 1864 during the Battle of Willow Creek.

In the following pages, we will dive deeper into the available information on each member of the original Salvatore family, with a particular interest on Damon Salvatore, a Civil War solider who deserted his post in the Confederate Army for his progressive beliefs about equality, and Stefan Salvatore, the believed ancestor to the Salvatore descendants.

I blinked in shock at the revelation about this Damon Salvatore deserting his post for his contradictory beliefs to the confederacy, wondering if it could be true that someone like that would become the monster Enzo described to me this morning. As I looked over the photo of him that Caroline had been gushing about, my entire body froze.

There Damon stood in his confederacy uniform and charming smile with a face I could remember like the back of my hand.

"Are you okay?" Caroline asked, leaning closer to press the back of her hand to my forehead. "You're paler than you were when you had the flu in freshman year. Are you like, going to be sick again, Mar? What's wrong?"

I'd seen him before, on the missing poster in my dad's office. A "medical patient" who'd gone missing some years ago and was considered a danger to himself and to the public.

Dad always pointed it out, telling me to be careful if I ever saw that man from the time I was just a child.

"Mar? Margot? Please say something."

Damon Salvatore was still alive, and my dad knew. My dad knew he was dangerous. My dad knew what he was.

It felt as though someone had swept a blanket of warmth over my entire body, and the next thing I knew, Caroline screamed.

Then everything went quiet, and darkness pulled me headfirst into oblivion.