Saige has always known she was haunted by a presence.
And she’s right.
She just didn’t know it was me.
I’ve followed her since she was a little girl, the shadow that was always behind her. I watched her grow up into the young, nervous woman she was, witnessing every fumble she made in life. She was as useless and pathetic as the rest of the Wolvercraft clan, but there was something about her that reminded me of myself. A naïve girl, too scared to venture out of her comfort zone, too ignorant to know that people in this world were self-centred and cruel.
Saige is a loner because I made her so. I gave her nightmares in the evenings, messed with her emotions during the day, and destroyed her ambitions. It wasn’t difficult. My winning card was dividing her and Jasper. My curse couldn’t claim the young musician, not when he wasn’t in Ashvall, but I could still break the pair apart. He was easy to influence. I planted whispers in his head while he slept, encouraging him to marry Saige. He’d been a puppet on my strings when he proposed. And just as easily, I convinced him to break it off, leaving her desperate, afraid, and alone. She was wrapped in nothing but misery and self-loathing. I wanted her to experience the joy of love, like I had, and then be crushed by disappointment. I couldn’t let her find happiness, not when I was trapped in this house, on this island, with her as my only escape. The daughter of the Wolvercraft bloodline doesn’t deserve love, not when mine had been my killer. Love was my curse, and I’ll be damned if I don’t see it destroy the Wolvercraft family.
Saige and I are, in a way, sharing a soul. Perhaps it was the deaths of our mothers that so strongly linked us—that same unbearable, gut-wrenching pain that surrounds Saige’s ongoing life and my short one. When I learned that Xavier Wolvercraft was to be married, my connection with Saige was easy to manipulate. I possessed her in her sleep. It wasn’t hard to write to her brother and confess my deepest, cherished desires that he and his fiancée wed at Wolvercraft Manor. Saige wasn’t even aware that she wrote the letter or posted it. I signed it “Dad,” knowing Xavier would never disobey his father.
Derrick Wolvercraft.
Even the name makes my stomach curdle. He is in every way like my Frederick. Arrogant. Selfish. Obsessed with self-image and his own entitled worth.
Yes, I watched them all arrive at Wolvercraft Manor. Every one of them pawns falling into my trap, each piece moved across the chessboard of my own making.
Dr Harriette Reynolds was not part of the plan. Her research led her to connect the curse to me, its instigator. Interfering, prying, meddlesome woman. I couldn’t let her tell Saige and ruin everything I had worked so hard to achieve. I stalked Dr Reynolds though the Hauteville Woods on the evening of the party. It was a foolish choice to travel on her own. I felt the fear hang in her chest when she realised she wasn’t alone. Her panic was heavy and debilitating, her movements sloppy through the trees. My echoing, beating footsteps pulsed in her ears as I gained closer. At the last second, at the moment she realised I was behind her, she turned around, her eyes filled with dawning horror. I bared my teeth in a dark, bitter smile and snapped her thick neck. She fell in a limp mess. Her body I gave to the earth, a deep hole where no one would find her.
You will understand why I did it. The descendants of Frederick are a disease on this earth. I hate them with a passion that stirs my blood and makes the darkest part of my heart bleed. Frederick George Wolvercraft took everything. My mother. My fortune. My life.
My soul.
And as long as I walk the halls of Wolvercraft Manor, I have vowed his descendants will pay the price.
And they have.
They always will.
Generation after generation.
I will be there for every death.
Now it’s time you learn my story.
* * *
Tianna Sinclair