Blood: Prologue.

Alina’s point of view:

A week before our parents died — though of course we had no way of knowing it then, not in any conscious or useful sense — I paid a woman on the side of the road to make my little sister smile. We paid for her to lie. Or perhaps that is not fair; perhaps it is truer to say we paid her to speak, and it was only later that the lie became visible in retrospect, visible not because what she said was false, but because it was true in a way we did not yet have the language to interpret. I have found that is often the case with omens — like a half-heard phrase in another tongue, they are never meant to be understood in the moment. They simply imprint themselves, quietly and without permission, and remain dormant until something terrible grows large enough to cast them in shadow.

We were somewhere in southern Europe — I couldn’t tell you where now if I tried. All those cities blurred together after a point: narrow streets slick with fruit pulp, cafés that smelled of drain water, storefronts with signs in a language that was neither French nor Italian but somehow both. I remember the plastic chairs on the sidewalk were red. I remember Aurora’s shoelaces were tied into little bows, as they always were, and that Nico, who must have been ten or eleven at the time, had a habit of chewing the inside of his cheek when he was nervous, which I mistook then for thoughtfulness.

She was a palm reader, or at least that is what the board at her feet claimed in three chipped languages. She sat cross-legged in a folding chair at the edge of a market square in a city I do not remember now. It was the kind of place with cracked yellow trams and too many pigeons, where every corner smelled vaguely of diesel and cardamom, and where the light at dusk turned every building the color of bone. The woman wore six scarves and no shoes, and her fingers were smudged with ash or coal dust or something darker. Her teeth were few and strangely even. She held herself with a theatrical kind of stillness, the kind I now recognize as a survival tactic rather than confidence.

Aurora went to her first, without prompting. She was only three years old, and the world — whatever shape it had taken so far — still belonged to her. She believed, at the time, that the moon followed her specifically, that her eyelashes were magical, and that people who looked tired could be made happy again just by drawing them pictures of the sky. She laughed often and without reason, and had a disconcerting habit of staring directly at strangers in public with an expression of complicated and absolute delight.

The woman took her hand. It was not a gesture of affection or even curiosity. It was something colder, something reverent, something almost scientific. She turned Aurora’s palm over in her hands and smiled without mirth.

“She is clever,” the woman said, in that staccato dialect that floats between countries and never belongs to one in particular. “But she will be sad. Deeply sad. Always.”

It is difficult to describe the way her voice landed in that moment. It was not sinister, not even unkind, but rather conclusive, the way a doctor might inform a family of a congenital condition, or a priest might point to a line in an old text and say there, that’s where it began. I remember thinking, even then, that she said it as though it were not just true, but inevitable.

She reached for my hand next, without invitation, and pressed her fingertips into my palm as though she were trying to feel something buried deep inside the skin. Her expression changed.

“An only child,” she muttered.

I began to protest — I always did, reflexively, in those days, “I have seven brothers, and—”

“And me!” Aurora interrupted, with the kind of gleeful self-importance only very small children are allowed to possess without consequence. Nico laughed. He leaned his full weight against me, warm and familiar, still boyish enough to believe he would never be separated from my side. It was late afternoon. The air smelled like iron and wet stone. I remember all of this with the crystalline clarity of a bad dream, the kind you have tried too hard to forget, only to have it return again, sharper and stranger each time.

The woman did not speak for several seconds. She studied Aurora’s face, then mine, then back again, and something about her expression— not frightened, exactly but altered stayed with me far longer than it should have.

“She has promise,” she repeated, slower this time. “Not as much as you. A fraction. But still real promise. She will know sadness, and injury, and a death” —

I snatched my hand back. She extended her hand for payment and winked at Aurora, not kindly, waiting. I gave her money. Not because I believed in any of it; the palm readings, fortune cards, gypsy curses, all of that idiocy but because it had Aurora entertained for a minute, and because I was tired, and because, even then, I did not know how to say no to Aurora when she looked at me like that.

“Alina” —

“It’s all bullshit,” I said to Nico but I was watching Aurora crouch by a puddle, captivated by the movements of a ladybird crawling up her sock, and in the moment I said it, I wasn’t sure I believed it. Behind us, our parents were laughing. I don’t remember why. I remember only the sound of its clean, golden echo of laughter in an unfamiliar square and the weight of Nico’s hand on my sleeve, holding it loosely for the last time.

It is strange what you remember. Not the big things, not birthdays, holidays, the day you inherit an empire but the small ones, like the sound of your sister laughing on a day you were too tired to smile, or the way your coat stayed damp long after the rain had stopped.

Years passed. A man died in front of me and I learned, too early, that knowing the truth is often worse than believing the lie. I became the thing I feared, and in doing so, I learned to stop fearing it. There was no ceremony. One day I was simply on the inside. And then everything that had once been strange ; violence, silence, loyalty that bordered on madness…became ordinary.

Later that year…no, it must have been later than that, because by then the laughter had stopped, and I had stopped expecting it. I returned to my room from the rain, closing the door behind me as though shutting off a confession. My boots were soaked through, the soles caked with mud and blood and something else I did not inspect too closely. The cut on my hand was still hot and ragged. I had not eaten. I had not slept. These things are irrelevant now.

Aurora was on the bed, cross-legged, holding a picture book with the kind of stubborn concentration she always summoned when pretending to read. She looked up when I entered. She smiled. Her eyes were wide, reflective, expectant. For a moment, I felt as though I were seeing myself in miniature, unspoiled by experience. I had to hand her over to her uncle and aunt the next day, it was a hard day for our family. Our lawyers lost her guardianship. We had lost our protectors and we had then later lost our youngest sister. The boys were scattered, hurt and lashing out, especially Nico. I can now admit that it had been no different for me.

“I promise,” I said, though I do not remember deciding to speak, or walking across the room. “Nothing will ever hurt you.”

She tilted her head. “Like the lady said?”

I furrowed my eyebrows at her, confused.

“What lady?”

“The one with the cards. You said she was dumb. But she said I’d be sad.”

There are moments that pass so quietly that you do not realize they have changed everything until much, much later. Her voice was small, her tone curious, even a little bored but to me it landed with the weight of prophecy.

I stood up. Walked to the vanity. Picked up the knife.

Aurora did not move. She watched me with the unbothered patience of someone used to waiting for answers, and confident they would come.

“Are we playing pretend?” she asked.

“No.”

I knelt in front of her. My coat was still wet. I did not take it off.

“Give me your hand.”

“Am I in trouble?” Her lip now wobbled. Aurora did not hesitate, though in putting her hand out. My order was obeyed despite her scared eyes. All eight of them had always done the same and I intended to keep it that way until I could fix their lives for them.

“No. I’m fixing it.”

“Fixing what?”

I did not answer. I took her hand, turned it palm-up, and with one practiced motion drew the blade across the skin. She flinched and a sob left her lips. I pressed our bleeding hands together. The warmth of her skin against mine felt like absolution, though I suspect that, even then, it was already penance.

“You’re brave,” I told her, picking her little body up in my aching arms. Her face buried in the crook of my neck. Her little body shook with sobs. “It’s done. I changed it. You won’t be sad. I won’t allow it.”

It was an irrational and impulsive decision. I do not often think of it but that night, our last night together, there was blood on her nightshirt. On my neck. It didn’t matter. Nothing did except this: she would not suffer what I had suffered. She would not be me.

And then I sat in the dark and waited for morning, knowing — as I still know now that the promise I had made was not to her, but to the future, and that one day, it would come back to collect some irony as well.