AllFreeNovel
Share Us
PROLOGUE
London Suburbs, 1850
Natalia snaps her head back at the sound of twigs breaking behind her. Her feet, clad in the fashionable slippers the London ton swears by, bleed so hard I can smell the metallic tang from here, and her modiste-made dress keeps catching and tearing on branches, slowing her run.
She has to fight with the rusted lock of the shed, but her father’s old skeleton key finally prevails, and the door opens with a creak. Natalia slams it behind her, turning the key from the inside to lock herself in. Not that a locked door would keep me, or the fate awaiting her, at bay.
Slinging her sack from her shoulder, she fishes the ornate jewelry box and drops it on the ground before removing the set of keys from the chain around her neck. She lines the item one last time, as if the answer could finally come to her in a eureka moment.
An obsidian egg; a filigree ring; a miniature animal skull; a bloodied coin. The heart-shaped locket, and the set of three keys all small enough to fit, but none good enough to open it.
She sighs. “I could not do it. I forfeit.”
She needn’t raise her voice — I would hear a mere whisper. She pulls one of the floorboards up to hide the jewelry box beneath it. “But you shall never again subject another to this nightmare.”
In the scent of her emotions, I distinctively smell the decisiveness of her words. She believes them to be true. As she burns alive, failing a challenge she’d lost from the start, she takes solace in knowing no other will have to die in this game.
I, however, have seen this plot play out thrice already — I can say with certainty, this won’t be the last.
Turin, July 1899
“Has anyone seen Anna Maria?” Emanuele asks his closest friends in hushed tones. Heir to an esteemed Italian noble family, Emanuele has been involved for a few years in a sordid relationship with the beautiful Anna Maria, a woman of neither noble birth nor genteel manners, but naively sweet and caring.
If the poor sod only knew what his lovely Annaria is doing just several paces away, in his dark chambers.
Sitting on the bedroom floor, the teary-eyed woman fidgets with a pitch-black locket and a bunch of keys. In front of her, the open jewelry box has already been filled with the obsidian egg, the filigree ring, the animal skull, and the bloodied coin. It’s only missing the locket and keys.
“Put them inside, Anna. There’s no point continuing to try,” I tell her in Italian.
Anna Maria lifts her gaze toward the window, squaring me with as much hatred as she can muster. Her scent takes on that foul note of rotten egg, the smell of her anger, that I have become intimately familiar with over the past two months.
“I have loved you,” she says in a dirge devoid of emotion, intoned like a mass.
“I know. They all do,” I answer from my cloak of shadows.
Annaria looks at the ten keys in her hand and strokes each one. “Will I be the eleventh one?”
“Put them away,” I say, which is not really an answer while simultaneously being one, and Annaria obeys with a sigh.
She raises her gaze toward me for an interminable moment. I could not say what she finds in my darkness-clad face. My lips are curled in that unbothered half smile I’ve perfected over the years. If she sees anything past it, she does not dig. Not that it would matter, now.
In a sudden movement, she clutches her chest, air leaving her mouth in a hiss. She won’t get to say goodbye to Emanuele, the man she loved enough to take a deal with a monster. With her last gargled breath, she collapses into a pile of twisted limbs. In the moment, her beautiful corvine hair that had gotten her so many men’s attention reflects so much blue that her head may be the deepest abyss. She may be the sea itself.
New York City’s Chinatown, 1988
Meilin runs through the corridors of the immense hotel like she’s competing in the hundred-meters at the Olympics. The open windows let in the sounds of the celebration on the streets outside, with music and chants and children playing. Meilin looks at her watch. She’s right to hurry — it’s almost midnight. Fireworks won’t be the only thing exploding, then.
Whatever the damned box is missing, Meilin couldn’t find. The fact that she’d known that the moment she took the deal, that the last two months have been less of a furious chase against time and more of a prolonged final goodbye, doesn’t make tonight any easier than the ones that have come before.
She runs all the way to Huiling’s room. The woman she’d been willing to die for. Because if she’d won the game, I would’ve granted her a lifetime with her beloved, society be damned.
There’s a part of me that wishes I could still uphold my end of the bargain, even if she didn’t fulfill hers. It would be moot, though — the curse demands a sacrifice. Meilin’s time is up.
Huiling opens the door, eyes wide. Meilin surges forward and kisses her, and the door shuts behind her. I let them have this last moment, as I stroll casually back toward Meilin’s room.
She’ll be back before midnight, anyway.
As if on cue, Meilin returns thirty minutes later, as the clock strikes five minutes to. Her eyes are bright and puffy, but she doesn’t shed another tear as she puts all the items inside the jewelry box and closes the lid. She lays them methodically, calmly, like she’s pouring tea.
