At my seventh wedding, they replaced me.
The Oracle pointed at me and screamed one word: "CURSED."
Father's hand cracked across my face. Mother tore the wedding dress off my body and shoved my cousin Seraphine into it.
"She'll marry him instead," Father said. "You'll destroy us all."
What they didn't know? A thousand years ago, our family made a blood pact with the Shadow Lord himself: if the eldest Ashford daughter remained unmarried on her twenty-sixth birthday, she belonged to HIM.
Today was my twenty-sixth birthday.
I begged Julian to run. "Please. We have until sunset."
He laughed. "The Shadow Lord's a fairy tale, Anna. Seraphine's just going through the motions. You're being dramatic."
Then he told my parents everything.
They locked me in the tower.
But the Shadow High Priest's warning was clear—at sunset, the Shadow Lord would come. And when he did, I'd drink the Potion of Forgetting and lose everything.
My memories. My name. My soul.
The clock struck five.
He was coming.
