A week passed in the cold, gray purgatory of a home that was no longer a home. The silence in Wren & Co. was a sickness, punctuated only by the scrape of her father's chair, the rustle of Bram's books, and the frantic, silent beating of Isadora's own heart.
The obsidian key lay wrapped in a scrap of velvet at the bottom of her sewing box, a dark, venomous secret. She could feel its presence even from across the room, a cold spot in the air, a whisper of a promise of a terrible, necessary power. Beside it, nestled in a bed of loose buttons and tangled thread, lay the Duke's silver cufflink. The wolf's head seemed to watch the serpent key, two predators locked in a silent, eternal battle for her soul. She could not bring herself to touch one or discard the other.
They were her two paths. Damnation, or a different, more gilded kind of damnation.
