Prologue
It was almost beautiful now.
Twilight had softened the sharpness of the garden's decay—casting gold across broken bricks, weaving through the hanging moss like a lover's touch. The fountain in the center no longer ran, but something about its silence made it feel more alive.
Katherine stepped through the cracked iron gate without pause.
She didn't need to knock.
This was her house now.
It always had been, in a way.
The estate sat just outside Charleston, tucked behind miles of cypress and oak. It had once belonged to Marcel—refined, monstrous Marcel. But Katherine had always found that men like him clung to grandeur to distract from the rot beneath.
She walked through the door as if she were expected.
Dust rose beneath her heels.
The chandelier still hung from the ceiling, crooked and dulled. The piano in the corner was missing two keys. She let her fingers drift across it.
A single note echoed—flat. Hollow.
"How long," she whispered, "before the world forgot me?"
She crossed the parlor, her hand trailing along the wall, and descended the cellar stairs without hesitation.
It was cold down there.
Still.
Smelling faintly of blood and old stone.
The place where Damon had first broken.
She reached the center of the room and stopped.
The floor was still stained.
Even after all this time.
"He was so soft back then," she murmured, kneeling. "So quick to hurt. So desperate to matter. And so, so easy to give away."
Her fingers brushed a faint mark carved into the floor—a sigil, half-worn.
She smiled.
"But he survived."
She stood, straightened her coat, and turned to the back wall.
"Good.
We'll need him whole when the others come."
The shadows shifted behind her.
Not a breeze.
Not a whisper.
Something else.
Watching.
Always watching.
Katherine reached into her coat and withdrew two envelopes.
One, already opened.
She folded it in half and left it on the stone table.
"For Damon."
The second?
She pressed a fresh seal into the wax—silver this time.
The Bennet symbol.
"And one for the witch. She's stronger than I expected."
Her heels clicked softly as she ascended the stairs again.
The cellar swallowed the light behind her.
And below, in the dark, something smiled.