Prologue

Twelve Days Before the Wedding

The dead woman in Drawer Seven had my sister’s wedding ring and someone else’s bones.

I discovered the first lie in her teeth.

Elise had broken her left canine falling from the orchard wall when she was eleven. I had been beneath her, holding a stolen pear and laughing too hard to catch her. The royal mortician’s corpse possessed a flawless set of teeth, white and even beneath lips sewn shut with blue thread.

I stood alone in the Crown morgue at two in the morning, wearing a black veil and a widow’s stolen pass, and looked at the body officially identified as Elise Vale.

“You are not my sister,” I whispered.

The corpse did not disagree.

Six months earlier, Elise had married Duke Adrien Bleu. She became the seventh woman to enter Château Barbe-Bleue in bridal white and vanish before the season changed. The court called it tragedy. The villages called it proof.

Bluebeard killed his wives.

The Crown investigators had accepted a sealed coffin, a physician’s statement, and one ring returned on a length of black ribbon. They had not inspected the face beneath the funeral veil. They had not measured the bones. Men who valued their careers did not accuse the Duke who controlled the northern border.

I had valued my sister more.

I removed the corpse’s ring and examined it beneath the morgue lamp. Elise’s initials were engraved inside the band. Beneath them, nearly invisible, someone had scratched eight narrow lines.

Seven were vertical.

The eighth lay across them like a barred door.

Footsteps sounded in the corridor.

I closed the drawer, extinguished the lamp, and slipped behind a cabinet of embalming salts. The morgue door opened. Yellow light spread across the stone floor.

Two men entered.

The first was Crown Inspector Marot, my former superior and the man who had ordered Elise’s case closed. The second wore a dark blue coat without insignia. He was tall enough that he ducked beneath the lintel. Even in silhouette, there was something unnervingly controlled about him.

Duke Adrien Bleu.

I had seen his portrait in court files: forty-one, decorated general, landholder, serial widower. Paint had failed to capture the physical force of him. He moved like a man accustomed to armor, broad shoulders held rigid beneath expensive wool.

Marot stopped beside Drawer Seven. “The younger Vale woman requested the autopsy report again.”

“And you refused,” Adrien said.

His voice was low, rough, and entirely without surprise.

“Of course.”

“Why?”

Marot laughed nervously. “Because the report does not exist.”

Adrien turned his head.

The inspector’s amusement died.

“Your Grace, we followed the arrangement. A closed casket. The signet. No questions about the estate.”

“I made no arrangement with you.”

“Your secretary—”

“My secretary drowned three years ago.”

Silence filled the morgue.

I pressed one hand over the stolen ring in my pocket.

Adrien pulled open Drawer Seven.

For several seconds, he studied the false Elise. His face revealed nothing. Then he reached beneath the corpse’s jaw and broke one of the blue stitches with his thumbnail.

Black ink leaked from the tiny wound.

It did not run down the dead woman’s neck. It moved against gravity, climbing Adrien’s finger in thin branching lines.

He jerked his hand back. The ink vanished beneath his cuff.

Marot crossed himself.

“Who prepared this body?” Adrien asked.

“Your household delivered it.”

“My household did not.”

“Then who—”

The corpse opened her eyes.

Marot screamed.

They were not human eyes. Each iris contained a small bronze keyhole. The dead woman’s head turned toward Adrien with a wet pull of stitched flesh.

“Seven doors,” she said.

The voice came from inside the drawer, the walls, and the metal cabinet behind my spine.

Adrien did not retreat.

“Where is Elise Vale?”

The corpse smiled through blue thread.

“Waiting for the eighth wife.”

Its gaze shifted.

It looked directly at the cabinet hiding me.

“Sabine,” it whispered.

Adrien moved before Marot could react. He crossed the room, seized the cabinet, and dragged it away from the wall.

I stepped into the light with my dagger already against his throat.

The blade touched skin. A faded blue mark beneath his collar stirred like ink in water.

He looked down at me, pale eyes calm.

“Inspector Vale,” he said.

“Former inspector.”

“You kept the ring.”

“You kept my sister.”

Behind him, Marot fled. The morgue door slammed. Adrien did not glance back.

“If Elise were in my keeping,” he said, “you would not have found a substitute corpse in a Crown drawer.”

“Seven women disappeared behind your walls.”

“Yes.”

“You never denied killing them.”

“Denial would have brought investigators.”

I increased the pressure of the dagger. A bead of blood appeared. “You were afraid they would find bodies?”

“I was afraid the castle would notice them.”

The answer was absurd. The blue marks beneath his skin shifted again, arranging themselves around the point of my blade like a map trying to form.

Adrien felt it. His eyes narrowed.

“Show me the ring.”

“Show me Elise.”

“I cannot.”

“Then bleed.”

His mouth almost curved. Not amusement. Recognition.

“You are exactly as she described.”

My grip faltered by less than an inch. “You spoke to her?”

“Six months ago.”

“Before she disappeared.”

“Before she opened the seventh door.”

The corpse in Drawer Seven began to laugh.

The sound made every cabinet vibrate. Bronze keyholes surfaced across the steel fronts—one, two, three, multiplying until the morgue became a corridor of sealed doors.

Adrien caught my waist and pulled me sideways as Drawer Seven slammed shut with enough force to sever a hand. My back struck his chest. For one startling second, his body shielded mine from a storm of flying metal.

Then the room was ordinary again.

He released me immediately.

On the floor between us lay a massive iron key.

Neither of us had dropped it.

“The outer gate,” Adrien said.

“To your castle?”

“It appears Château Barbe-Bleue has invited you.”

I looked at the key, then at the false corpse. “I do not require an invitation.”

“No,” he said. “You require legal standing. The castle recognizes blood, ownership, and marriage. You have the first. I will give you the other two.”

Understanding arrived cold and complete.

“You want an eighth wife.”

“I want an investigator the castle cannot expel.”

“And in exchange?”

“Your family keeps its land. You retain sovereignty over your person. No consummation clause. No locked outer gate.” He glanced at the ring hidden in my fist. “You find your sister. I find out what she built inside my house.”

“If I prove you killed them?”

Adrien met my eyes. “Then you hang me.”

The morgue clock struck three.

I picked up the iron key. It was warm, as though another hand had just released it.

“Send the contract,” I said.

Twelve days later, on my wedding night, I broke a quill signing my name beside Bluebeard’s.