All Chapters of The House of the Damned: Sin & Deceit (A Dark Romance): Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

Georgia's POVThe first time I ever saw Josiah Mason, I felt his presence before I saw him. A pressure change in the atmosphere, like the moment before lightning strikes. At our summer gala, he materialized beside me as I stood alone by the fountain, nursing champagne and claustrophobia."Georgia Steele," he said, my name leaving his lips like a receipt for something he'd already bought and was just here to pick up.I turned to find a man who didn't occupy space so much as command it. Late thirties, with hair like midnight streaked with silver at the temples, and eyes the color of a storm-charged sky. His suit fit like it had been sewn around him, tailored to intimidate. Not handsome. That word was too soft, too simple. He was compelling the way predators are compelling. You can't look away even as every instinct you have screams at you to run."Mr. Mason," I replied, my voice steady despite the ice flooding my spine. "I've heard so much about you.""All favorable, I hope." His smile

Georgia's POVThere was one lesson my mother seemed determined I absorb before walking down the aisle. Not about love, or happiness, or even survival. Those were secondary concerns, the kind of things women like us were not supposed to want badly enough to name out loud. What mattered was understanding my place.That afternoon, after the fitting, she led me into her private sitting room with the quiet authority of a woman who had rehearsed this moment. The room with the velvet curtains drawn just enough to cast the place in permanent dusk. I had been in this room a hundred times and it had never once felt welcoming. It felt, instead, like the inside of something held very tightly closed.Through the gap in the curtains I could see her rose garden below, sculpted within an inch of its life, not a single petal out of place, every cane trained and tied and forced into the shape she had decided it would take. She had spent fifteen years on that garden. I used to think it was her hobby. St

Georgia's POVThe day descended upon me with the silent certainty of an eclipse.I felt it before I opened my eyes. That particular quality of morning light pressing through my curtains, too bright, too insistent, the kind of light that does not care what it is illuminating. I lay in the last bed that had ever been mine and stared at the ceiling and listened to the house already moving around me, voices in the hallway, the caterer's van in the drive, my mother's heels on the marble below, precise and relentless as a metronome counting down to something that could not be stopped.My wedding day.I felt it metastasizing inside me, an exquisite malignancy spreading cell by poisoned cell. Not a celebration. A transaction. One where my flesh was the only currency that held any value, and it had never truly belonged to me. Not in any way that mattered.This is what dying feels like. A slow, beautiful suffocation wrapped in silk that everyone applauds.I was still in bed when the knock came.

Georgia's POVThe reception was held at the Meridian, the most prestigious event space in the city, a building that had hosted governors and galas and the kind of gatherings where the flower arrangements cost more than most people's monthly rent. My mother had selected it eight months ago, before the ink was even dry on whatever agreement my father and Josiah had reached across a mahogany desk somewhere, before I had been formally informed that my future had already been scheduled and catered.The ballroom was extraordinary. I will give her that much.Twelve-foot floral installations cascaded from the ceiling, white roses and trailing greenery, lit from within by warm gold light that made everything look like the inside of a dream. The tables were dressed in ivory linen with crystal that caught and scattered light in every direction. A string quartet played in the corner, something classical and romantic and completely disconnected from anything I was feeling.Four hundred people move

Georgia's POVThe first time I stepped into Josiah's house, our house, as he constantly reminded me with that razor-thin smile, I knew I had made a deal with something worse than the devil. Devils, at least, wear their intentions like a second skin. They do not bother with Victorian exteriors and stained glass and the particular kind of beautiful lie that promises sanctuary while delivering a cage.The champagne burned bitter on my tongue as I stood frozen in the cavernous foyer, wondering if I had somehow slipped through the veil between worlds and landed in my own personal purgatory. Marble floors stretched like alabaster glaciers beneath my feet. Chandeliers hung above me, crystalline and enormous, their brilliance fracturing into shards of light that danced across walls so high and so pale they seemed designed specifically to make a person feel small.The air tasted of lemon polish and old money and something underneath both of those things that I could not name but recognized. Ar