I’m the only one who can.
“Tell him I appreciate the sentiment.”
David didn’t argue. He’d learned, over the years, which battles weren’t worth fighting.
“The car will be ready at ten,” he said instead. “Is there anything else you need before you go?”
A time machine. A different ancestor. A life where I didn’t inherit a dying man’s grudge.
“That will be all.”
David nodded and left. The door clicked shut behind him.
The penthouse took twenty minutes to secure.
Alessandro moved through the space with mechanical efficiency, checking locks and wards, activating the security system that would alert him if anything supernatural crossed the threshold. The apartment was sleek and modern: chrome and glass and sharp angles. No photographs on the walls. No mementos on the shelves. Nothing that couldn’t be abandoned at a moment’s notice.
You live like you’re already leaving.
He pushed the thought away. Sentimentality was a luxury. So was comfort. So was anything that might make it harder to do what needed to be done.
His suitcase was packed in ten minutes. Two Tom Ford suits, three pressed shirts, his broken-in Ferragamo loafers. His laptop. The copies of every document he’d gathered about the curse. A TracFone he’d bought at a CVS in Midtown, because paranoia was only paranoia if you were wrong.
At the door, he paused. The penthouse stretched behind him, beautiful and empty.
His phone buzzed. A text from an unknown number.
Safe travels, Alessandro. I do hope you find what you’re looking for in Sweetwater Cove.
No signature. He didn’t need one.
Heat surged through him. Smoke curled from his nostrils before he could stop it, and his knuckles itched where the scales wanted to break through. He breathed through it. Deleted the message.
He knows where you’re going. He knows what you’re looking for.
Of course he did. Malachar always knew.
The question was why he cared.
Alessandro pocketed the phone and left. The lock engaged behind him, final.
The private jet was fueled and waiting when he arrived. One of the last Draven luxuries; the family still owned it outright, though Alessandro suspected that wouldn’t last another decade at the current rate of loss. He boarded without ceremony, accepted coffee from the flight attendant, and opened his laptop before they’d reached cruising altitude.
Sweetwater Cove. Population three thousand. A supernatural community on the Maine coast, old money mixed with older magic. The Draven family had holdings there once: a manorhouse, now crumbling; a seat on the town council, long abandoned; a vault in the supernatural archives containing documents too dangerous or too ancient to keep anywhere else.
Including the original curse contract.
He pulled up the file he’d compiled. Everything he knew about the curse, which wasn’t enough. Everything he suspected about its origin, which was mostly speculation. Leads that went nowhere. Specialists who’d taken his money and delivered nothing. A decade of searching with nothing to show for it except a growing certainty that the answer existed somewhere, in some form, if he could just find the right thread to pull.
And a name. One he’d found in his grandfather’s journals, underlined twice with a note in the margin:The Pearls were there when it started. They might remember.
A selkie family. Sea-folk who’d lived in Sweetwater Cove for generations. Who’d been present when his great-great-grandfather broke his oath. The journals mentioned a selkie woman who’d tried to intervene, who’d begged the Draven ancestor to help, to honor his promise, to do the right thing.
He hadn’t listened. And two centuries later, his descendants were still paying for it.
The Pearl family might remember what happened. Might know details that hadn’t made it into the official records. Might even know something about breaking the curse: some loophole, some exception, some way out that Alessandro’s ancestor had been too proud or too stupid to ask about.
It was a thin lead. Barely a lead at all.
