Chapter One: The Promise

My name was Edmund Cross, and I want you to understand something before I tell you how I died: I was not a fool. I did not believe in curses the way villagers believe in them, with their charms and their muttered prayers at crossroads. But I believed in patterns. And by the spring of my thirty-eighth year, the pattern around me had become unmistakable.

It started with my uncle, Reginald Cross, and the eighteen lakhs I had lent him two winters before - money he swore he needed to save his failing trade business, money he never once mentioned repaying. Then there was my wife, Cordelia, whose eyes had gone flat and distant around me long before I noticed it, the way a house grows cold long before you see the frost on the windows. And there was her brother, Victor Hale, a man who visited our home with increasing frequency, always with some reason, always lingering after Cordelia had gone to bed, the two of them talking in low voices that stopped the moment my footsteps creaked on the stairs.

I am not ashamed to say I was afraid. A man can feel the shape of his own death circling him long before it lands, the way you feel a storm in your joints before the sky has even darkened.

There was only one soul I trusted with this fear: my nephew, Jonah. Just twenty years old, gentle in the way that made the rest of the family call him soft, useless, a boy who read too many books and asked too many questions. He was Reginald's son, but nothing of his father lived in him - no greed, no calculation, only a kind of wide-eyed loyalty that I had loved since he was a child clutching my sleeve at festivals.

"They mean to kill me," I told him one evening, six months before the end, when we sat alone by the canal behind my house. "Cordelia, Victor, your father. And others - I count nine now, Jonah. Nine people bound together by what they owe me or what they want from me."

Jonah's face went pale. "Uncle, that's-"

"I am not finished." I gripped his wrist, harder than I meant to. "If anything happens to me - if I fall ill, if I am declared dead - you must not let them bury me quickly. Promise me you will make them wait. Three days. Insist on three days."

"Why three days?"

"Because there are ways to make a living man look dead, Jonah. There are women in this district who deal in such things - herbs that slow the heart to a whisper, that still the breath until it cannot be felt. Black arts, if you want to call them that, though I think it is only chemistry dressed in incense smoke. I have heard whispers. Cordelia has been visiting one such woman in the eastern quarter."

Jonah was crying by then, though he tried to hide it. "I'll protect you, Uncle. I promise."

I should have known a boy's promise carries no weight against a houseful of grown men with money and a story already prepared.

Three months later, I collapsed at the dinner table after Cordelia served me a bowl of her favorite curry - the one dish she always insisted I try fresh, before everyone else.

I remember the room tilting. I remember Victor's face above me, strangely calm, almost satisfied. I remember Cordelia's voice saying, "Call the physician," in a tone with no real urgency in it, the tone of someone reading lines.

And then I remember nothing. Nothing at all - not blackness, not dreaming, simply absence, as though someone had folded the lights of the world closed like a book.

I did not know, then, that I was not dead. I would not learn that until much later, in the worst possible way: awake, and unable to move, in the dark.

______________________________________

End of Chapter One:

A.N. - Some promises are made to be broken before they're even spoken. Keep reading, this is only the beginning. 🖤

...ΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩ...

***Download NovelToon to enjoy a better reading experience!***