The Reaper's Contract: A Soul for Vengeance

Elara and Adrian had been married for seven years. On the night of Elara's birthday banquet at the Seaside Manor, the great hall was packed with guests and blazing with light. Elara stood in the ground-floor hall receiving birthday wishes, caught up in the warmth of it all. Up on the second-floor balcony, Clara fell from the height and struck the marble floor dead in the centre of the banquet hall; blood spread across it in an instant. The laughter stopped dead, and the whole room slid into panic. Everyone downstairs looked up at the second floor, and there on the balcony stood Matteo, and no one else. In a moment Elara was swept into the vortex of a murder case, the stain of it thrown straight at her and her brother. At the instant Clara died, only Elara saw Death — Knox — appear to escort the soul; ordinary people could not see him at all. From that day on, Knox could shrink to the size of a palm and float beside Elara, surfacing from time to time.Adrian looked at his sister lying dead in the pool of blood, lifted his eyes to Matteo at the second-floor railing, and then — faced with Celeste's testimony and the accessory recovered from the scene — the trust built over seven years of marriage shattered completely. He concluded that Elara and her brother were the ones who had killed Clara.After the murder at the banquet, a marriage already riddled with cracks collapsed altogether. Adrian pinned the whole of his sister's death on Elara, took their daughter Lia from her, and forced the young girl to call Celeste mother. Lia suffered from a rare blood disease, and every resource for her treatment was held firmly in Celeste's grip. Celeste forged the medical records and caused the death of Elara's mother Sofia; Matteo was then silenced in prison. Having lost one close family member after another, Elara also learned that she had cancer — and that she happened to be Lia's only matching bone-marrow donor.On the edge of death, Elara struck a contract with Knox: she would sacrifice her entire soul in exchange for a chance to return to the living world, and for the power of Death. Elara came back with that power in her hands and began a merciless revenge.