Chapter 2
Chapter Two
The numbers were getting worse.
Alessandro Draven stood at the floor-to-ceiling windows of his Manhattan penthouse, watching the city glitter forty stories below. Behind him, his laptop displayed the quarterly report he’d memorized hours ago. Two point three million. That was how much the family had lost since January.
The curse was accelerating.
He pressed his palm against the cold glass, letting it leach some of the heat from his skin. The dragon in his blood ran hot, always had—hotter still when he was angry, which lately meant constantly. Control was the only thing standing between him and a very expensive insurance claim.
You’re losing.
He turned back to the documents spread across his dining table, a surface that had never once been used for dining.
Financial records going back decades. Investment portfolios that read like obituaries.
Legal briefs from six different supernatural attorneys, all saying the same thing in progressively more expensive language: We don’t know how to help you.
Useless. All of them.
His grandfather’s voice echoed in his memory: The Dravens don’t ask for help. We solve our own problems. Good advice, except Grandfather had died in a one-bedroom apartment in Queens, selling off heirlooms to pay for groceries. Pride intact. Bank account empty.
His father was headed the same direction.
Slower, because Alessandro had been secretly funneling money into his accounts for years, but inevitably.
The curse didn’t care about clever accounting.
It found every investment, every venture, every desperate attempt to build something that lasted, and it drained them dry.
Two hundred years of Draven men trying to outrun a dying witch’s vengeance. Two hundred years of failure.
Alessandro was supposed to be different.
He picked up the oldest document on the table: a photograph of a contract, brittle and yellowed, written in a language that predated modern English. The original curse binding. He’d stared at it so many times he could trace the symbols in his sleep.
Blood of the oath-breaker, bound until released. Fortune for suffering, gold for grief. What was taken shall be taken in turn, until the debt is paid or the line burns out.
His great-great-grandfather had promised to protect a witch’s descendants. Had broken that promise when protecting them became inconvenient. He had stood by while a mob burned their home, done nothing while they screamed. And now every Draven born since had been paying for his cowardice.
Alessandro had grown up on the stories. The investments that crumbled overnight.
The businesses that thrived for exactly long enough to matter before collapsing.
His uncle, who’d made a fortune in shipping and lost it all to a freak storm that insurance refused to cover.
His cousin, whose tech startup had been worth millions until a server fire destroyed everything, backups included.
Bad luck, people said. The Dravens have terrible luck.
It wasn’t luck. It was mathematics. A debt being collected, one loss at a time, until nothing remained.
The line burns out.
That was the part that kept Alessandro awake. The curse would end one of two ways: broken, or fulfilled. And fulfilled meant extinction. The last Draven dying alone and forgotten, the way his grandfather had. The way his father was headed.
The way Alessandro would, if he couldn’t find another path.
His phone buzzed, shattering the thought.
He glanced at the screen. Malachar.
He let it ring three times before answering.
“Alessandro.” Malachar’s voice was warm, avuncular, the kind of tone that invited trust. “Burning the midnight oil again? It’s nearly four in the morning.”
“I’m aware of the time.”
“Of course you are. You’re always aware.” A soft chuckle. “I heard about the quarterly losses. Two point three million, wasn’t it? Concerning.”
How did you know? He didn’t ask. Malachar always knew things he shouldn’t. The demon had been a “family friend” for as long as Alessandro could remember, longer even, though the details were always conveniently vague.
“The numbers are within projected parameters,” Alessandro said. A lie. The numbers were twenty percent worse than his worst-case model.
“Are they? Because I’ve been running my own projections, and I worry, Alessandro. I worry that you’re shouldering this burden alone when you don’t have to.”
“I have it under control.”
“Do you?” The warmth didn’t waver. That was the unsettling part: Malachar’s voice stayed perfectly pleasant even when his words carried edges.
“Because I could send someone. A specialist I know, very discreet. She’s broken curses older than this one.
There’s no shame in accepting help from those who care about you. ”
He could feel the dragon stirring, heat building in his throat, and forced it back down.
Control. Breathe. Don’t give him anything.
“I said I have it under control.”
A pause. Longer than necessary. When Malachar spoke again, the pleasantness had thinned, and underneath it Alessandro caught smoke and old copper.
“Of course you do. You always do.” Another pause. “But Alessandro… the offer stands. Whenever you’re ready to stop punishing yourself for sins you didn’t commit.”
The line went dead.
Alessandro set down the phone and stared at it. His hands shook. Heat radiated from his palms, warping the air above them. He pressed them flat against the cold glass of the window and waited for the sensation to fade.
He’s trying to help.
He’s trying something.
He didn’t trust Malachar. Had never trusted him, though he couldn’t articulate why.
The demon had been helpful for generations; he had advised his grandfather, his great-grandfather, everyone back to the curse’s origin.
Always there. Always smiling. Always offering exactly what the Dravens needed, at exactly the moment they were desperate enough to take it.
That’s what demons do, the rational part of his brain supplied. They wait. They watch. They make themselves indispensable.
But indispensable for what? If Malachar had wanted the family destroyed, two centuries had offered ample opportunity. Instead he’d helped. Advised. Supported.
Unless the helping was the point. Unless keeping the Dravens alive and suffering served some purpose Alessandro couldn’t see.
He shook his head. Paranoia. That’s all this was: the sleeplessness and the stress turning him into his grandfather, seeing enemies in every shadow.
Smoke curled from his nostrils before he could stop it. He breathed through his mouth until it dissipated.
Control. Always control.
His assistant arrived at six with coffee and an expression of barely concealed concern.
“You haven’t slept.”
“I’ll sleep when this is over.” Alessandro took the coffee: black, scalding, exactly right. “The Sweetwater trip is confirmed?”
David produced his tablet. One of the few people Alessandro hadn’t managed to drive away in fifteen years of being, as his brother put it, “aggressively unpleasant.”
“Flight leaves at noon. Private terminal, as requested. I’ve arranged accommodations at the Sweetwater Grand Hotel; they had availability because of the legal summit happening this week. The town’s supernatural archives are open by appointment only. I scheduled you for tomorrow morning.”
“Good.”
“I also compiled a list of curse-breaking specialists.” David held up a hand before Alessandro could interrupt. “I know. You don’t want them. But sir…”
“No.”
“Three of them have experience with dragon bloodlines. One worked on the Valdez situation in Argentina, and she successfully broke a four-generation…”
“I said no.” The words came out harder than intended. David didn’t flinch; to his credit, he never did. But his expression shuttered.
“Sir. With respect. You’ve been pursuing this alone for a decade, and the curse is accelerating.”
“Which is why I need to handle it myself. Specialists cost time. Consultations cost time. I need the original contract, and I need to study it without someone looking over my shoulder telling me what I should already know.”
“And if the contract doesn’t have the answer?”
“It will.”
It has to.
David was quiet. “Your father called.”
Of course he did.
“He wanted to know if you’d made any progress. I told him you were pursuing a promising lead.”
“That was generous of you.”
“I also told him you were taking care of yourself.” David’s gaze was pointed. “I’d prefer not to have lied about both things.”
Alessandro exhaled. A small concession, barely noticeable, but David had been with him long enough to have earned honesty. Or at least something closer to it than Alessandro gave anyone else.
“I’m fine.”
“You’re running yourself into the ground.”
“I’m doing what needs to be done. What no one else will do. What our father is too proud to acknowledge needs doing at all.” The words came out bitter. He hadn’t meant them to. “Someone has to fix this. It’s going to be me.”
“And if it can’t be fixed?”
The question sat between them. No one had ever asked it before. Not out loud. Not to his face.
Heat flickered at his fingertips, threatening to scorch the papers he was holding. “Then I’ll die trying. Which is what’s going to happen anyway if I do nothing.”
David nodded. “Your brother called too. Dante. He said to tell you he’s thinking about you. That you don’t have to do this alone.”
Yes, I do.
I’m the only one who can.
“Tell him I appreciate the sentiment.”
David didn’t argue. He’d learned, over the years, which battles weren’t worth fighting.
“The car will be ready at ten,” he said instead. “Is there anything else you need before you go?”
A time machine. A different ancestor. A life where I didn’t inherit a dying man’s grudge.
“That will be all.”
David nodded and left. The door clicked shut behind him.
The penthouse took twenty minutes to secure.
Alessandro moved through the space with mechanical efficiency, checking locks and wards, activating the security system that would alert him if anything supernatural crossed the threshold.
The apartment was sleek and modern: chrome and glass and sharp angles.
No photographs on the walls. No mementos on the shelves.
Nothing that couldn’t be abandoned at a moment’s notice.
You live like you’re already leaving.
He pushed the thought away. Sentimentality was a luxury. So was comfort. So was anything that might make it harder to do what needed to be done.
His suitcase was packed in ten minutes. Two Tom Ford suits, three pressed shirts, his broken-in Ferragamo loafers. His laptop. The copies of every document he’d gathered about the curse. A TracFone he’d bought at a CVS in Midtown, because paranoia was only paranoia if you were wrong.
At the door, he paused. The penthouse stretched behind him, beautiful and empty.
His phone buzzed. A text from an unknown number.
Safe travels, Alessandro. I do hope you find what you’re looking for in Sweetwater Cove.
No signature. He didn’t need one.
Heat surged through him. Smoke curled from his nostrils before he could stop it, and his knuckles itched where the scales wanted to break through. He breathed through it. Deleted the message.
He knows where you’re going. He knows what you’re looking for.
Of course he did. Malachar always knew.
The question was why he cared.
Alessandro pocketed the phone and left. The lock engaged behind him, final.
The private jet was fueled and waiting when he arrived.
One of the last Draven luxuries; the family still owned it outright, though Alessandro suspected that wouldn’t last another decade at the current rate of loss.
He boarded without ceremony, accepted coffee from the flight attendant, and opened his laptop before they’d reached cruising altitude.
Sweetwater Cove. Population three thousand.
A supernatural community on the Maine coast, old money mixed with older magic.
The Draven family had holdings there once: a manor house, now crumbling; a seat on the town council, long abandoned; a vault in the supernatural archives containing documents too dangerous or too ancient to keep anywhere else.
Including the original curse contract.
He pulled up the file he’d compiled. Everything he knew about the curse, which wasn’t enough.
Everything he suspected about its origin, which was mostly speculation.
Leads that went nowhere. Specialists who’d taken his money and delivered nothing.
A decade of searching with nothing to show for it except a growing certainty that the answer existed somewhere, in some form, if he could just find the right thread to pull.
And a name. One he’d found in his grandfather’s journals, underlined twice with a note in the margin: The Pearls were there when it started. They might remember.
A selkie family. Sea-folk who’d lived in Sweetwater Cove for generations. Who’d been present when his great-great-grandfather broke his oath. The journals mentioned a selkie woman who’d tried to intervene, who’d begged the Draven ancestor to help, to honor his promise, to do the right thing.
He hadn’t listened. And two centuries later, his descendants were still paying for it.
The Pearl family might remember what happened. Might know details that hadn’t made it into the official records. Might even know something about breaking the curse: some loophole, some exception, some way out that Alessandro’s ancestor had been too proud or too stupid to ask about.
It was a thin lead. Barely a lead at all.
But Alessandro had built an entire career on turning scraps into victories. On finding the angle no one else saw. On solving problems that everyone else had given up on.
This is what you do. This is who you are.
The voice in his head sounded too much like his father’s for comfort.
He closed the laptop and looked out the window.
Clouds stretched below the jet like dirty cotton.
Somewhere beneath them, the Maine coastline was approaching.
A small town he’d never visited. A family he’d never met.
A two-hundred-year-old contract that might be the answer or might be another dead end in a long line of dead ends.
A quick trip. In and out. Find the contract. Find the Pearls. Break the curse.
Simple.
His dragon stirred, restless. Heat prickled beneath his skin, and a single thread of smoke curled up from the cuff of his shirt before he caught it.
He pressed his palm flat against the cold window until it stopped.