The official envelope arrived with the morning chill, nestled like a carcass upon the silver tray—an intruder amid the scent of rosehip tea and linen-draped quiet.
Black wax, glistening like oil, sealed it shut—embossed with a grotesque crest: a crow devouring a rose in full bloom. Violent. Ravenous. Romantic in a way that left a bitter taste on the tongue.
A crimson ribbon was tied around it, vivid as blood against the paper the color of bone. Too vibrant. Too alive for something so stark and final. It lay there as if it breathed, as if the silver tray recoiled beneath it.
Julia Harrow stood motionless, fingers curled loosely around the back of the velvet chair. She didn't reach for it. Not yet.
Her gaze locked on it—sharp, calculating, unwilling to betray the tremor building low behind her eyes. That creeping throb at her temples. Not the dagger-pain yet. No, not yet. Just the whisper. The warning.
Behind her, Aunt Evelyn had gone still as well, one stockinged foot halfway through a slipper, teacup suspended midair.
"Oh, God," she breathed. "You're not opening that. Tell me you're not."
Julia didn't move. Didn't speak. The letter sat as though watching her.
It had been years since she'd seen wax on a letter. Years since Marian had written to her in that frantic, looping scrawl—words that bled from the edges, desperate and full of half-told truths.
And that last letter… the one she'd never opened…
Still tucked in her writing desk drawer.
Still sealed.
Still guilty.
Unforgiven.
But this was not Marian's hand.
Julia's gaze dropped to the ribbon. Silken. Cold. Tied with obscene precision. Not a single strand frayed, as though even time itself had hesitated before touching it.
She extended one hand, slow as ritual. Touched it. Let her fingers graze the texture—smooth as serpent's scales. It loosened easily beneath her thumb.
Evelyn rose so abruptly the armchair rocked backward. Her silk robe whispered like ghost-hands against the floor.
"Julia, don't." Her voice shook—soft, but cracking at the edges. "You don't need to read that. You know what they're asking. You know what that place is."
But her voice had begun to sound far away.
That house.
Blackwood Hall.
It hovered like a specter behind the letter, behind the name that even now she hadn't allowed herself to speak aloud.
Julia's fingers betrayed her. Slipping beneath the seal, coaxing the wax until it cracked.
A soft sound. Barely audible.
Yet it echoed through her bones.
The paper unfolded with a rasp, thick and expensive.
Calligraphy, neat and cold. Ink darker than the seal. Masculine. Beautiful. Final.
> Miss Harrow,
> It is with profound sorrow that I write regarding the death of my wife, Marian. Her passing was swift and unexpected, and though we spared no effort, she succumbed to fever in the early hours of the 17th.
> She spoke often of you.
> As her closest living relation, I request that you attend Blackwood Hall to arrange her personal effects. Additionally, the art collection Marian began cataloguing remains in disarray. I trust, as an esteemed historian, you will have both the aptitude and the care required to see it through.
> Your room awaits. I shall have the carriage sent to the station.
> —Alistair Blackwood
There was no warmth. No closing niceties. No regards or wishes for health or peace.
Just a name that felt like frost beneath her skin.
Julia stared until the ink began to shimmer at the edges, blurring as though her eyes no longer knew what to believe.
Alistair Blackwood.
She whispered it inside her head. Let it take shape like smoke curling up from a candle snuffed too soon.
Marian had spoken of her? Spoken often?
The words carved through her with dull surprise.
Marian had stopped writing nearly a year ago. Julia hadn't heard her voice since spring. Hadn't answered that final letter. The one that came in a rush of ink and desperation. The one that now haunted her every time the drawer creaked open.
And now she was dead.
Gone, as if her life had been snatched up by some unseen hand while Julia had been too wrapped in her own shadows to reach back.
The dreams had been too much then. The voices. The mirrors that whispered and the shadows that didn't stay still. The pounding in her skull that no tonic could dull.
She hadn't been well.
No one had said the word aloud until Evelyn did. Until the doctors.
A breakdown.
As though her mind had simply come apart like rotted lace.
"I won't allow this."
Evelyn was pacing now, her slippered feet dragging against the carpet. Her voice had gone shrill, frantic. "That man—he's one of them. The Blackwoods. They're all cursed, Julia. That house... that family..."
Julia didn't look up. The letter remained in her lap, fingers still trembling against its edge.
"Marian wrote to me. Only once. She said she was afraid."
The pulse behind Julia's right eye bloomed, slow and hot, like ink bleeding into paper.
"She said they watched her," Evelyn continued, clutching at her robe like it might shield her from memory. "That they made her doubt herself. That she felt things she couldn't explain."
Julia exhaled through her nose. A slow, practiced motion.
Evelyn's voice was near breaking now. "You think you're well enough for this? After last year? After the breakdown?"
The word fell like ice into her chest.
Breakdown.
She loathed that word.
It reduced months of fear and pain to something clinical. Something diagnosable. As if she'd fractured instead of drowned.
As if she hadn't bled out in silence every single night beneath the weight of unseen things.
As if it hadn't all felt real.
The laughter in her dreams. The shadows that stretched too far. The blood in her sink that no one else had seen.
"I'm not sick," Julia whispered.
A lie.
But one she needed to speak aloud.
Later that day, Julia walked the long corridor of the British Museum, her heels tapping a restrained, steady rhythm across the veined marble tiles. The place ought to have brought her calm—these echoing halls filled with centuries of memory, dust, and devotion—but today the silence pressed differently. Not serene. Not reverent. It was as if the air were holding its breath.
And so was she.
The telegram still sat on her writing desk at home. Marian. Dead. Sudden fever. Arrangements underway. No details, no condolences. The clinical phrasing of death, as though her cousin had simply slipped into the shadows between catalogued artifacts.
Julia could not remember what she had done with her hands after reading it. Only that her tea had grown cold beside her and Evelyn had not looked surprised when Julia told her.
"The Blackwood men are all mad," Evelyn had said, brushing lint from her sleeve like it was dust from a grave. "Marian wrote to me once. She was afraid."
And Julia, haunted by the sealed envelope in her drawer—Marian's last letter, never opened—had found herself swallowing silence like poison.
Her footsteps slowed in the east wing, the air thick with the strange perfume of aged stone and old wax. She rounded the final turn toward the Roman exhibit, her mind flicking through details and dates, craving distraction in clean, ordered facts. Nero. Vespasian. Domitian. Madness passed down like inheritance.
She stopped in front of a marble bust—Augustus, serene and watchful beneath centuries of dust and reverence—and caught her reflection in the polished glass that protected it.
Only… something was wrong.
Her breath caught.
Just a flicker. A shiver. But unmistakable.
Her reflection hadn't moved when she had.
It remained still as she tilted her head, its eyes locked forward, unblinking. One terrible heartbeat passed in silence. Her throat tightened.
It had to be the light.
Her temples pulsed—subtle, but familiar. A prelude to the kind of migraine that pressed bruises behind her eyes and made the world swim. She blinked once. Twice. Her own face—sharp, pale, framed by the auburn strands that had slipped loose from her chignon—stared back at her again, but it was hers now. Aligned.
Still, her skin had gone cold beneath her gloves.
"Ma'am?"
She flinched. A man passed close, brushing her shoulder. He wore a bowler hat and a long grey coat, the collar turned up against the fog that crept like ghosts outside. Mid-forties, perhaps. His gaze caught hers—too direct, too familiar.
He looked at her as though he knew her.
Julia didn't know him. She was certain of that.
But there was no mistaking the intent in his eyes. Like he was about to say something long rehearsed, something chosen just for her.
He leaned slightly closer, his voice low, barely brushing the silence between them.
"Careful where you go," he murmured, his eyes still locked on hers. "That house doesn't let go."
Her breath faltered.
"What did you—?"
But he was already gone, walking with quiet purpose through the museum's great glass doors and into the waiting fog beyond.
Julia stood motionless, her spine stiff, her fingers tingling as though she'd touched frost. She pressed them to her lips without thinking.
They were cold. Far too cold.
In her mind, Marian's name uncoiled like smoke.
Her thoughts scattered like startled birds from branches.