Below the words was a recipe. Not for food but for something else entirely. Ingredients she didn’t recognize. Instructions that read more like ritual than cooking. And in the margin, in Nana’s familiar scrawl, a note:
Marina, my darling: when the dragon comes, remember what matters. When the time comes, trust yourself. The sea chose you for a reason. And so did I.
She stared at the words. Read them again. A third time.
Her grandmother had known. Somehow, impossibly, Nana had known something was coming. Had known it would involve Marina. Had left her instructions and never said a word.
Why didn’t you tell me?
The locket flared hot enough to burn.
The lights flickered once. Twice. Went dark for a heartbeat before stuttering back to life.
And somewhere in the distance, far away but getting closer, Marina heard thunder. Except the sky through the window was clear, stars just beginning to emerge, and the sound was rhythmic in a way that thunder never was.
Not thunder.
Wingbeats.
Marina stood in the bakery holding the book, the locket burning against her throat, listening to something ancient and impossible flying toward Sweetwater Cove.
She closed the book. Pressed it against her chest.
Outside, the wingbeats grew louder.
Chapter Two
The numbers were getting worse.
Alessandro Draven stood at the floor-to-ceiling windows of his Manhattan penthouse, watching the city glitter forty stories below. Behind him, his laptop displayed the quarterly report he’d memorized hours ago. Two point three million. That was how much the family had lost since January.
The curse was accelerating.
He pressed his palm against the cold glass, letting it leach some of the heat from his skin. The dragon in his blood ran hot, always had—hotter still when he was angry, which lately meant constantly. Control was the only thing standing between him and a very expensive insurance claim.
You’re losing.
He turned back to the documents spread across his dining table, a surface that had never once been used for dining. Financial records going back decades. Investment portfolios that read like obituaries. Legal briefs from six different supernatural attorneys, all saying the same thing in progressively more expensive language:We don’t know how to help you.
Useless. All of them.
His grandfather’s voice echoed in his memory:The Dravens don’t ask for help. We solve our own problems.Good advice, except Grandfather had died in a one-bedroom apartment in Queens, selling off heirlooms to pay for groceries. Pride intact. Bank account empty.
His father was headed the same direction. Slower, because Alessandro had been secretly funneling money into his accounts for years, but inevitably. The curse didn’t care about clever accounting. It found every investment, every venture, every desperate attempt to build something that lasted, and it drained them dry.
Two hundred years of Draven men trying to outrun a dying witch’s vengeance. Two hundred years of failure.
Alessandro was supposed to be different.
He picked up the oldest document on the table: a photograph of a contract, brittle and yellowed, written in a language that predated modern English. The original curse binding. He’d stared at it so many times he could trace the symbols in his sleep.
Blood of the oath-breaker, bound until released. Fortune for suffering, gold for grief. What was taken shall be taken in turn, until the debt is paid or the line burns out.
His great-great-grandfather had promised to protect a witch’s descendants. Had broken that promise when protecting them became inconvenient. He had stood by while a mob burned their home, done nothing while they screamed. And now every Draven born since had been paying for his cowardice.
Alessandro had grown up on the stories. The investments that crumbled overnight. The businesses that thrived for exactly long enough to matter before collapsing. His uncle, who’d made a fortune in shipping and lost it all to a freak storm that insurance refused to cover. His cousin, whose tech startup had been worth millions until a server fire destroyed everything, backups included.
Bad luck, people said. The Dravens have terrible luck.
