Promised by the Beast

A single drop of blood, brown and dried, marks the corner of the envelope. Lydia Hartwell reads it by the hissing gas lamp with her back to the parlor door, because her father is out at the woodpile and the maid is busy with supper and she has recognised the handwriting. *The blood promise made seventeen years past falls due at the turn of the season. I require the willing bride as agreed.* When her father comes in, the burn across his right palm is fresh and blistered. He says he caught the kettle handle. The kettle is iron. He has been burning something else. In the room at the top of the stairs, Rosaline lies propped on three pillows in a room that smells of rosewater and sickness, too weak to lift a cup, saying out loud what the doctor will not: that something inside her is broken and willow bark is not going to fix it. She is the daughter who was promised, back when she was healthy and her mother was dying and a desperate man traded a name he thought he could outrun. So Lydia offers herself instead. At the forest edge at dusk she meets Gideon Ashford, and the bargain he actually sets out is not the one she braced for. Stay in the Ironwood for one month. If she is not willing at the end of it, the bond dissolves and she walks free. And if she is willing, the curse breaks, the forest lets him go, he becomes mortal, and he dies as he should have died long ago. The manor's servants watch her with an old grudge. There was a bride before her, and the journal in the drawer is written in Gideon's angular hand and begins *She betrayed me*. There is a locket with a dark-haired woman painted inside it. There is a hunter named Malachi Ashford who learned from that bride how to find the Beast and how to wound him, and who has never stopped trying. And there is the one thing Lydia wants and cannot ask for: Gideon's blood is the only cure left in the world for her sister, and every drop he gives away is a piece of the forest he cannot reclaim. A gothic beast romance about blood promises, forged contracts and a bride who would rather choose than be given. Closed-door.