It had been a year. A year since she had died. A year since she had been tied down and assaulted by a dozen raving mouths, a year since she lay dying, and swallowing the blood of her sire. A year since her heart had stopped beating in her chest.
A year since she had lived.

Death had been unkind to her. Her sire had ignored her, focused on something else entirely. She was left with the Au Pair, to train and beat and teach. She was a fast learner of the social niceties, quickly picking up faces, titles, flowers, and symbols fast enough that the Au Pair didn't beat her too often. One phrase always stuck in her mind.
"You are a damned Princess, act like it!" usually followed by a smack across the face with a mace. "Yes most generous Baron Au Pair Carolin, please forgive my rudeness." She would enunciate clearly. She was a princess, she would not mutter or mumble, even as teeth broke and blood poured into her mouth, she would always enunciate.

And here she was, dressed in the black shroud of an initiate, looking over the ballroom where she would be introduced to the rest of society, introduced as an Invictus, introduced to the world as the Princess of Italy, forged into an unconquered woman.

She would kneel before the Count, and he would remove the shroud from her, and replace it with the purple shroud of her covenant, her people. She would rise in both power and poise, she would be respected, feared, and adored. She would be the Princess, even if only for one night. She would be the princess she had not been in life, the princess she had not been to her father, the princess she had not been to her family. She had shamed them, denigrated them, and dragged their name through mud. That was her failure, her shame, her pathetic life. Until she had been brought into this unlife, she had wasted what she had been given. It took a curse from god to cure her of her narcissism, to cure her of her ignorance.

In damning her, God had given her the greatest gift. She would never again squander such gifts. She would always act the royal she was, the royal she is, the royal she will always be. No one can take that away from her but herself.
And she will never be anything less.