You know that feeling when the universe nudges you—just a whisper at first, then a shove? Lydia Montgomery knew it well. Three years after burying her fiancé, Michael, she’d built a life of quiet routine: dusty art archives, too much tea, and a carefully constructed wall between her and the world. Grief had become her most familiar companion.
Then the envelope arrived.
No return address. Just her name scrawled in ink so elegant it looked like it had bled through from another century. "An invitation to Lord Ashford's estate," it read. "Where past and future mingle. Midnight, the hour of truth."
Ridiculous, right? The kind of thing you’d toss straight into the bin. But Lydia didn’t. Because beneath the grief, there was still a woman who’d once chased mysteries—the kind whispered about in museum corridors. Lord Ashford’s name floated through those whispers too: a recluse, a collector of the macabre, a man tied to stories of vanished lovers and curses older than the estate’s crumbling gargoyles.
So she went.
The mansion swallowed the moonlight whole. Its gates groaned open before she could knock, as if the house had been holding its breath for her. And then he was there—Damon Ashford, all sharp angles and eyes like fractured ice. "Miss Montgomery," he murmured, and the way he said it made her skin prickle. Not fear. Not yet. Something far more dangerous: recognition.
Inside, the air smelled of old parchment and storms. Lord Ashford—just Ashford, call me Ashford—waited in a study straight out of a gothic novel. Dark hair, storm-gray eyes, a smile that didn’t reach them. "I’ve been waiting for you," he said, and Lydia’s pulse did something reckless.
Here’s the thing about curses: they’re patient. They coil around your ribs when you’re not looking. Over days blurred together, Lydia unraveled the mansion’s secrets—the art, the hidden passages, the portrait gallery where one face stopped her cold.
Eliza Montgomery, 1824.
Her own eyes stared back.
Ashford’s voice was raw when he told her. "You’re her. Reborn." A love story cut short by betrayal, a curse stitching their souls together across lifetimes. And the kicker? To break it, Lydia would have to choose: stay trapped in the past with him, or walk away and let the curse—and him—fade forever.
Ever tried making an impossible decision while a ghostly version of yourself watches from a painting? Yeah. Not recommended.
The night of the storm, the mansion itself seemed to scream. Eliza’s apparition flickered in the secret chamber, her voice layered with centuries. "Love like ours is a fire," she whispered. "It either burns you alive or leaves you cold."
And God, Lydia wanted to burn. Ashford’s hands on hers felt like coming home. But home wasn’t a gilded cage, no matter how beautiful the bars.
In the end, she kissed him like it was the last time—because it was. The mansion crumbled around them, not with a roar, but a sigh. Dawn crept over the ruins as Lydia stood in the wreckage, her heart split open.
Some loves aren’t meant to be held. Some are just echoes, haunting the hollow spaces you didn’t know were there.
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