Which meant all of them were my ancestors.

“Here.” Chris handed me a glass, and with a shaking hand, I took a large swallow. The brandy seared down my throat, but did nothing to steady my nerves.

“She’s killing your maternal line,” he said, sitting across from me. “But why?”

I set my drink down on the floor, the answer coming to me even as he asked the question. “Blood.” I sucked in a breath of air through my teeth, seeing the verity of the trolls’ prophesy. “The connection of a blood tie can be important to some spells, because it is a link between people. That’s how she’s doing it.”

“But that means…”

“It means that all these women are her descendants. And,” I swallowed down the burn of brandy rising back up in my throat, “That means so am I.”

I clenched my fists so hard my pencil snapped. I’d thought the prophesy meant I’d do something, that it would be my and Tristan’s actions that would bring an end to Anushka’s life. But that wasn’t it at all. What it meant was that I was a future victim. I didn’t have to do anything – my very existence ensured she’d one day come after me to maintain her immortal life. All the trolls had to do was hold on to me and wait.

All this time, I’d thought there was something special about me, something making me uniquely capable of ending the curse. And what a fool I was to have thought so. Any of Anushka’s line would have been sufficient. Only chance had made it me.

Chris had picked up the end of my broken pencil and was counting on his fingers, then writing down numbers between names. “There’s something of a pattern,” he said. “There’s a few times she breaks with it, but for the most part, the deaths are usually nineteen or thirty-eight years apart. Can’t say what the significance of that is, but it does look as though she’s picking one off almost every generation.”

“My grandmother’s name isn’t on our list.”

Chris picked up the map and unrolled it, pointing to the burn mark we hadn’t investigated. The one on the road to the Hollow.

Taking the pencil, I carefully wrote my grandmother’s name and the year of her death. It was nineteen years after the last name on my list. By the odds, the soonest Anushka could be expected to kill again was nineteen years later. I did the math. “We have six years before she’s likely to strike.”

“It could be less,” Chris warned.

“Or longer.” I wondered how Thibault would take it when I told him he could have another twenty-five years to wait before Anushka came after me. I did not think it would sit well with him to know that he’d be a doddering old man when he finally won his freedom.

Except it wouldn’t be me she came after.

Leaping to my feet, I snatched up the lamp and went over to where my mother’s portrait hung. It was many years old, from the prime of her youth, and before she’d given me the necklace. With a shaking hand, I reached up to touch the gold paint on the canvas. I wasn’t the next target, my mother was.

“Are you going to tell the trolls it’s Genevieve she’ll go after?”

“N… N…” I tried to force the word no out, but it kept sticking on my lips, the desire to do what was needed to fulfill my promise feeling almost as necessary as breathing. “If I tell them, they’ll kill her in the hopes of ending Anushka’s immortality, and with it, the curse. If it were me, it would be different. Being bonded to Tristan keeps me safe from the King. He might well drag me back to Trollus to keep me out of the witch’s reach, but he won’t kill me.”

Chris looked unconvinced, but I knew that despite how horribly Tristan’s father treated him, he’d never risk killing him. Thibault did the things he did because he believed Tristan needed to be a certain kind of man to rule the trolls. And while I’d never condone or truly understand his abuse of his son, I was certain that the King would do everything in his power to keep Tristan alive.

The sound of Sabine’s laugh trickled through the walls, echoed by the deeper sound of the guard. We both hurried behind the curtain at the far end of the room.

Just as I dimmed the lantern, the door opened, and two sets of footsteps came inside. “I told you that you were imagining those voices,” Sabine said. “There’s no one here unless the opera house has ghosts.”

“What’s this ladder doing in here?”

“They’re probably making space for Cécile de Troyes’ portrait. You did hear that she’s to star in next season’s production?” It was only because I knew her so well that I heard the nervous edge to her voice. “Now didn’t you say you’d show me the salons out front? I’ve been dying to see them.”

“For a pretty girl like you, I can show you anything you like.”

Sabine giggled, and I rolled my eyes on her behalf, but a sigh of relief still escaped my chest when the door opened and shut again. “Let’s get out of here.”

Leaving the ladder where it was in case the guard came back, we moved silently through the dark corridors of the theatre and out the crew entrance.

“Sabine will meet us here,” I said, extracting a pair of warmer gloves from the pocket of my cloak. “We need to think of a plan – of some way to protect my mother.”

“Cécile?”

I jumped, colliding with Chris as I spun around. “Fred?”

My brother stepped out of the shadows, his black horse trailing along behind. “What are you doing here at this hour?”