Whispers of Ink and Starlight

Chapter 1

She knows only the man across the table.

Father.

His cold eyes like drops of oil. Full cup of coffee, black. An impatient trimmed fingernail tapping a lace coverlet. In his other fist, he holds a glass vial filled with her blood.

She flips her hand to see the cut, but it’s closed up now. Only a thin mark remains across the treelike lines of her palm. The head, the heart, the life, the fate. All bullshit, at least for her. She will never have love, a life, a destiny.

She will just have him.

“Very good.” Father’s voice is sleet on the back of her neck. He sets the vial down and wipes her blood from his knife blade with a napkin.

Her reflection swims in the vial’s concave side. Violet bags droop low over her freckled cheeks.

She knows what he will say next so vividly, she could be an oracle.

Two consecutive blows, each worse than the actual incision across her palm.

Scrape. The knife slides across the table, its wooden handle pointed at her.

“Now, again.”