Lottie Matthews sat silently in the dimly lit chamber, her back straight against the cushioned chair, eyes vacant as her handmaiden worked deftly through her tangled hair. The candlelight flickered, casting long, quivering shadows on the stone walls. Each stroke of the brush pulled through her hair with an almost rhythmic force, but Lottie’s mind was elsewhere, lost in a place far darker than the room that enclosed her. The crackling of the distant fire was the only sound that seemed to anchor her, its warmth barely reaching her skin.

Her parents had journeyed to the North, leaving her behind to fend off the growing dread of what was to come. They spoke in whispers of alliances and promises, plans to bind her to a family of power, one she had no desire to be wed to. Marriage was a prison she did not want to enter, but it was not her choice. She had never been given a choice.

Lottie had long been known as the hysterical daughter—prone to outbursts and strange fits of emotion that no one seemed to understand. Her mother, ever the believer in the supernatural, was convinced of Lottie’s psychic gifts, though to many, it was just another part of her odd, unpredictable nature. Her father, however, dismissed it entirely, attributing it to some affliction of the mind, a flaw he wished would simply disappear. But no matter what they called it, Lottie knew the truth—she could feel things others could not. It had always been this way.

And yet, all of that seemed to matter little now. With her fate decided without her voice, the psychic visions that clouded her mind only served to torment her more. They were but whispers of a future she had no say in, a future that pressed down on her chest like a suffocating weight.