Title: Velvet and Venom
Chapter 1 – The Colour of Envy
London, 1873
Belgrave Square, early October
The gas lamps along Belgrave Square had barely been lit when the first carriage door slammed with the particular violence only a truly furious sixteen-year-old could manage.
Inside number 17, the drawing room smelled of burnt sugar, rose attar, and the faint ozone crackle that always followed when someone used magic while angry.
Lady Evangeline Ashwood—Evie to precisely no one who valued their tongue—stood in the centre of the Aubusson carpet wearing nothing but her chemise, corset laces dangling like hanged men, and an expression that could curdle cream at thirty paces.
“Repeat that sentence,” she said to her younger sister, voice dangerously sweet, “but slower. And try not to sound quite so pleased with yourself.”
Cressida Ashwood, seventeen next month and already the undisputed queen of every ballroom she deigned to enter, leaned against the marble mantelpiece with the lazy grace of a cat that had just pushed something priceless off a ledge.
“I said,” Cressida repeated, enunciating each syllable like cut crystal, “that Mama has finally decided the emerald parure—the one Grandmother wore when she hexed the Prince Regent into proposing—will go to me for my come-out ball. Not you.”
Evie’s fingers twitched. A thin thread of violet light, the colour of bruised plums, licked along her knuckles before she forced it down.
“How thoughtful of her,” Evie murmured. “And did our sainted mother happen to mention why the heirloom that has belonged to every first daughter for four generations is suddenly being handed to the spare?”
Cressida smiled the smile that had already ruined three debutantes this season without her ever raising her voice.
“Because darling, everyone knows you’re… difficult. And the Ashwood sapphires suit my complexion better anyway.”
The room temperature dropped three degrees. The fire in the grate hissed like it had been personally insulted.
Evie stepped forward, bare feet silent on the carpet. When she was close enough that Cressida could smell the bergamot oil still clinging to her sister’s skin from her bath, she tilted her head.
“You do realise,” Evie said softly, “that the emerald parure carries a rather specific curse? It only ever brings luck to the woman who rightfully inherits it. Everyone else… well. Let’s just say Great-Aunt Theodora’s wedding night ended with her husband spontaneously combusting.”
Cressida’s smile didn’t waver.
“Then perhaps you should have been nicer to Mama these last three years.”
A beat of perfect, poisonous silence.
Then Evie laughed—low, delighted, the sound of someone who has just been given permission to be truly awful.
“Very well,” she said. “Keep the emeralds. I’ll take something far more interesting.”
She turned on her heel and walked toward the door, corset laces trailing behind her like battle banners.
“Where are you going?” Cressida called after her, suddenly less amused.
Evie paused in the doorway, one hand on the frame. When she looked back, her eyes had gone the deep, liquid amethyst that meant she was already weaving something dangerous.
“To find out,” she said, “exactly what Mama is so desperate to hide that she’d rather give Grandmother’s murder-jewellery to you than risk me wearing it.”
The door closed with a soft, decisive click.
Cressida stared at the empty space her sister had occupied.
For the first time in months, the perfect mask slipped—just a fraction.
She whispered to the empty room:
“You have no idea what you’re looking for, Evie.”
But the fire only crackled in reply.
Downstairs in the servants’ passage, Evie didn’t bother with the main staircase.
She took the narrow servants’ stairs two at a time, bare feet silent on the worn wood, violet light trailing from her fingertips like dying fireflies. At the second-floor landing she paused, listening.
Somewhere above her, in the attics, a floorboard creaked that had no business creaking.
Evie smiled.
“Hello, Papa,” she murmured to the darkness. “Still hiding from your own children?”
No answer.
She hadn’t expected one.
Her father, the Honourable Archibald Ashwood, seventh Viscount Ashwood, had not been seen in daylight since the night of the last Winter Solstice ball—three years ago almost to the day. Officially he was “indisposed.” Unofficially, most of society believed he had finally drunk himself into an early grave.
Evie knew better.
She had felt him moving through the house ever since—never in the same room, never close enough to touch, always just out of sight. A cold spot in a warm corridor. A shadow that fell the wrong way. The faint smell of snow and gunpowder that had clung to his coat the last time he’d hugged her.
And tonight, for the first time in three years, he was moving with purpose.
Evie lifted her hand. The violet light brightened, illuminating the narrow stairwell in bruised twilight.
“Come out, come out,” she sang softly. “Or I’ll start breaking things until you do.”
Silence.
Then—very faintly—the sound of something metallic scraping against wood.
Evie’s smile sharpened.
She climbed.
The attics of Ashwood House had always been a place of beautiful decay. Once-grand furniture shrouded in dust sheets, trunks of forgotten ball gowns, the skeleton of a crystal chandelier that had fallen during the Great Spell-storm of ’59 and never been repaired.
Tonight the air tasted different.
Metallic. Like blood and snow.
Evie stepped carefully between the trunks, violet light pooling around her bare feet.
And there, at the far end beneath the single circular window, stood her father.
Or what was left of him.
He was thinner than she remembered—almost translucent at the edges, as though someone had tried to erase him with a very sharp rubber. His coat still carried the old military cut, but the scarlet facings had faded to the colour of dried blood. His eyes, once the same startling amethyst as hers, were now completely white.
He did not speak.
He simply lifted one hand and pointed.
Behind him, half-hidden by a stack of mildewed hatboxes, was a door Evie had never seen before.
Not a normal door.
It was narrow, black-lacquered, and carved all over with the twisting Ashwood family sigil—the serpent eating its own tail. The handle was a single piece of cut obsidian.
Evie’s heart gave an unpleasant lurch.
“That,” she said, voice suddenly much smaller than she liked, “was not there yesterday.”
Her father’s mouth moved, but no sound came out.
Instead the temperature dropped again—sharply this time. Frost spiderwebbed across the nearest trunk.
Evie swallowed.
Then she walked past him—close enough that she could feel the arctic cold radiating from whatever he had become—and reached for the obsidian handle.
The moment her fingers touched it, every gas lamp in the house flickered at once.
Downstairs, Cressida dropped the teacup she had just picked up. Porcelain shattered across the Aubusson like gunshot.
In the attics, Evie turned the handle.
The door opened without a sound.
Beyond it lay not another attic room, but a staircase descending into absolute darkness.
And from somewhere far below came the sound of a woman singing—a lullaby Evie had not heard since she was six years old.
Her mother’s voice.
Soft.
Tender.
And impossibly young.
Evie looked back at her father.
He was crying.
Not the ordinary kind of crying.
Silver tears ran down his cheeks and turned to frost before they reached his jaw.
Then he lifted his hand again—this time in unmistakable warning.
Do not go down there.
Evie stared at him for a long moment.
Then she smiled the same dangerous smile she’d given Cressida twenty minutes earlier.
“Sorry, Papa,” she whispered. “But I’ve always been very bad at following instructions.”
She stepped through the doorway.
The door closed behind her without a sound.
And every clock in Ashwood House—every single one—stopped at precisely the same second.
11:47 p.m.
To be continued…
