Cursed by your love

The oath

Prologue

Year of our lord, 1526

The wind off the North Sea didn’t just howl, it screamed against the stones of Blackwood Castle, while below the waves slammed into the cliffs, wild and angry, just like the storm raging inside these walls.

On the highest tower, the stars were gone, swallowed by thick fog.

Lord Silas Sterling-Windsor knelt before a basin of black water, inky and still as death. His hands shook, not from the cold, but from the weight of what he was about to do.

Beside him stood the Duke of Ashford, his face empty, caught between grief and ambition. The blood deal was signed, the ink still wet on a promise that would chain their families for fifteen generations. And downstairs, in the silent gallery, the price was already being paid.

The Duke stared at his own hands. Ink stained his fingers from a contract that shouldn’t exist, and hands that had never shaken before couldn’t hold still now.

“You understand?” Silas whispered, his voice cracking. “My son marries your daughter for fifteen generations. Our wealth will grow, our power will stretch across oceans, but the price is blood. Our blood.”

“And if they don’t?” The Duke’s voice was hollow.

Silas didn’t look away from the water. “Then the Sterling-Windsor name dies, buried. And the Hart-Ashford name is wiped from history. We’re building an empire on graves, Ashford. Don’t forget that.”

A drop of blood fell from the Duke’s finger and hit the black surface. The water shook, then lit up, and inside it, a silver locket glowed faintly, hanging around the neck of a woman who wasn’t even born yet.

“She’ll carry it,” the Duke said quietly. “She’ll either break the curse… or it will break her.”

“The fifteenth,” Silas murmured, eyes on the dark horizon. “She has to be stronger than the fourteen before her, because if she fails, there won’t be a sixteenth generation left to mourn us.”

Far below, the first bell tolled deep, mournful. It rolled through the halls and woke the ghosts, and the wind carried it out to sea.

The curse had been fed.