All Chapters of THE CURSE OF LUST: Chapter 11 - Chapter 15

A week slipped by, slow and heavy.The real challenge was the pub itself. Every night I had to adapt to the strange environment, to the objects that were mine to manage yet subtly alien. Silver cutlery, plates with faintly embossed symbols, relics from long before the current owner had taken over—some pieces raw with history, forged in the days when witches had once lingered here. I burned my fingers on them the first few nights.Rapid as shadow, silent as a ghost, I replaced every object I touched during the nights. New metal or porcelain plates, clean cutlery, polished glasses—everything that bore a trace of history, silver or danger, found its way back into the night's careful rotation.By the end of the week, I moved through the pub as though it were my o

Slowly, Ashford reached into the leather bag at his side and set several small journals and books onto the table, their pages marked with post-its and notes crammed into the margins. Finally, he placed a small box on top.My brows pulled tight. "What's all this?"His gaze never left mine."Recollections of you. Through the years... through centuries." Then, with a voice low enough to shake me to my core, he added, "Lilith."I froze, breath caught in my throat. My blood went cold. Hearing that name from him—my real name—was like being stripped bare in the middle of the room.We did not move. His eyes pinned me in place, unblinking, certain. And for the first time in so long, I was afraid. Properly afraid.I forced myself to open one of the notebooks, then another, skimming words that were not meant for me to read. Men and women describing her—me—in scrawls of obsession. A woman of impossible beauty, described the same way, century after century. Politicians, nobles, peasants, even book