The Curator She Buried

Odile Vantrin has spent nine years restoring the dead. At the Reliquary Museum, she scrapes plaster from plague portraits and tells herself the corpses are long gone. Then a crate arrives addressed in her childhood handwriting, and the diary inside describes a murder that hasn't happened yet — in her own steady hand. The museum's benefactor, Séverin Vallée, knows what the book is. He has waited two centuries for a Vantrin to read it. Each entry Odile finishes comes true, in order, down to the last page. To stop the final line she must give the flame what it has always wanted: one of her blood, sealed in the tomb beneath the gallery. Odile has other plans. She intends to write a different ending — and make the flame take him instead.