Page 22 of A Spark in Time (A Knights Through Time Romance #21)

Things that are taller than the Chrysler Building will be: this lighthouse, apparently. Things that are smaller: my capacity to care.

Captain Marcos helped her onto the dock, his grip careful as if she might shatter. She probably would have, three months ago. Now she was held together by grief and spite and the kind of exhaustion that went bone deep.

“Lady needs healing house? Temple?” His Greek was getting better, or maybe she was getting worse at caring about proper grammar.

“Temple,” she said, because where else did cursed women go? “Isis, if they’ll have me.”

He looked at her silver-streaked hair—fully half silver now, as if grief were bleaching her from the inside out—and nodded. Everyone knew marked women belonged to the gods. Or to madness. In her case, both.

The city assaulted her senses like a jazz band with no rhythm section.

Merchants hawked everything from Baltic amber to Nubian gold.

Languages collided and merged—Greek, Egyptian, Hebrew, tongues she couldn’t place.

Bread baking. Fish rotting. Papyrus and ink and the peculiar sweetness of lotus perfume.

She saw none of it. Processed none of it.

Her body moved through the streets while her mind stayed three days behind, watching Kassander fall again and again, an endless loop of bronze through flesh.

“Live, silver girl. Curse me if you must—but live.”

Oh, I cursed all right. Cursed every woman who’ll ever share my blood. Top-shelf work, really. Mother always said I had a talent for dramatic gestures.

The Temple of Isis squatted near the harbor like a stone lotus, smaller than its cousins, but still impressive. Pillars carved with hieroglyphs she couldn’t read. Incense thick enough to swim through. Priestesses in white linen who took one look at her and knew.

“Sister,” the eldest said in accented Greek. Her eyes were kohl-dark, ancient, unsurprised. “The goddess dreams of you.”

Swell. Just what I need—divine attention.

They gave her a cell—tiny, austere, perfect.

A reed mat, a water jug, a window that faced the sea.

They asked no questions about the expensive chiton beneath her stolen cloak, the way she moved like someone who’d once worn diamonds, the silver spreading through her hair like spilled mercury that was now past her shoulders.

They simply accepted her, the way the sea accepts all rivers, eventually.

For three weeks, she did nothing but exist. Breathe in, breathe out. Eat when they brought food. Sleep when exhaustion won. Watch the lighthouse burn its endless fire while hers turned to ash.

Then the girl came.

Sixteen, maybe seventeen, with the kind of beauty that started wars—Helen redux, Cleopatra’s little sister, trouble in kohl and linen. She knelt outside Bebe’s cell at dawn, when the lighthouse flame looked pale against the coming day.

“They say you curse love,” the girl whispered in Greek. “They say you came from the sea, marked by the gods. They say you can make men suffer for their faithlessness.”

Bebe looked at her through the doorway. Saw herself at eighteen, desperate for freedom, for choice, for anything but what was handed to her.

“What’s his name?” Her voice came out rusty, unused.

“Marcus. A Roman merchant’s son.” The girl’s hands twisted in her lap. “He swore marriage, then married another. A senator’s daughter. For citizenship.”

Tale as old as time. Or as old as Rome, anyway.

“You want him to suffer?”

“I want him to know what he’s done.” Tears tracked through the girl’s kohl, black rivers on bronze skin. “I want him to wake at night and remember me. I want his marriage bed cold as tombs. I want his children to have my eyes so he can never forget.”

Bebe stood, muscles protesting. The priestesses had given her white linen too, but on her it looked like mourning clothes. Probably was.

She approached the girl, knelt opposite her, their knees almost touching. This close, she could smell rose oil and desperation—a familiar perfume.

“I can curse him,” Bebe said slowly. “But understand—curses are like jazz. Once you start the music, you can’t control where it goes.”

The girl frowned. “Jazz?”

“Never mind.” Bebe touched the girl’s cheek, her own fingers ice-cold despite the Egyptian heat. “The curse will work. He’ll suffer. But so will you. So will any woman who loves after betrayal. That’s how curses work—they splash back.”

“I don’t care.”

“You will.”

“Do it anyway.”

Bebe saw herself throwing Helen’s Tear into the storm, screaming her curse into the wind. Saw Kassander’s blood. Lysias choosing Athens. Her mother choosing security. Every woman choosing wrong, always choosing wrong.

“Give me something of his,” she said.

The girl produced a gold ring, simple, probably a promise ring. The kind of thing young men gave when they meant it. Before they stopped meaning it.

Bebe held it, closed her eyes, and felt the curse she’d created stir like a sleeping serpent. It was alive now, part of the world’s fabric, eager to work.

“Marcus Aurelius Calvus,” she intoned, making it up as she went but feeling truth in it, anyway, “may you love what you cannot have. May you reach for ghosts. May every woman’s face become the one you betrayed. May your marriage bed breed only regret.”

The words tasted like copper and lightning. The ring grew hot, then cold, then hot again.

“May your sons carry her beauty and your daughters carry her sorrow. May you die knowing you traded gold for brass, truth for citizenship, love for nothing at all.”

She opened her eyes. The girl was crying freely now, but also smiling—the terrible smile of someone who’d chosen destruction over powerlessness.

“It’s done,” Bebe said, handing back the ring. “Wear it on a chain. When you’re ready to let go, throw it in the sea.”

“Will I ever be ready?”

“No. But you’ll do it anyway, eventually. When the weight gets too heavy.”

The girl kissed her hands—both of them, like she was blessing and cursing herself simultaneously—and fled.

Bebe stayed kneeling in the doorway, watching the lighthouse pierce the morning sky. More would come. Word would spread. The foreign priestess who understood heartbreak, who could weaponize it, who charged nothing but the weight of knowing what you’d done.

This is what I am now, she thought. Not the Silver Siren. Not the oracle. The curse-maker. The one who teaches women to make weapons from their wounds.

She thought of her bloodline—daughters she’d never have but had somehow cursed, anyway. They’d have silver hair young, hearts that loved wrong, lives that glittered and shattered in equal measure.

They’ll be magnificent, she realized with something between pride and horror. They’ll burn bright and die young or live long and wish they hadn’t. They’ll choose the wrong men like it’s their job, love like drowning, survive things that should kill them.

They’ll be true Merriweather women. Cursed and blessed and too stubborn to know the difference.

A priestess brought breakfast—bread, figs, honey that reminded her of Athens. Of before. Of when she still believed in happy endings.

“Sister,” the priestess said gently, “the goddess says you carry a great working. A curse that will echo through time.”

“The goddess is chatty.”

“The goddess knows her own.” The priestess touched her silver-streaked hair. “You’ve paid the price for power. Now you must choose how to wield it.”

“I choose,” Bebe said, looking at the lighthouse that never stopped burning, “to give women what I never had. The power to curse back. To make their pain mean something. Even if it’s something terrible.”

The priestess nodded, unsurprised. “Then you’ll need a new name. The old one died in the sea.”

Bebe thought of Kassander calling her silver girl. Of Lysias calling her Siren. Of her mother calling her disappointment in pearls.

“Cassandra,” she said finally. “Call me Cassandra.”

“The prophetess no one believed?”

“The woman who told the truth even when it damned her.” Bebe stood, silver hair catching the light like a beacon. “Seems appropriate.”

The nausea hit her as she rose, sudden and unmistakable. Not the grief-sickness she’d been battling for weeks, but something deeper, more primal. Her hand went instinctively to her still-flat stomach.

No. Not now. Not when I’ve finally found purpose in this pain.

But even as she denied it, she knew. The way her body had felt different these past days, the exhaustion that went beyond grief, the way certain smells made her retch. She’d been so lost in sorrow she hadn’t recognized the signs.

Three months since Kassander had died. Two and a half since...

The storm. The night he kissed me in the rain, told me I was magnificent. When we thought we had forever.

A daughter. She knew it with the same bone deep certainty that had told her the ring wouldn’t take her home. A girl who would inherit Kassander’s storm-blue eyes and her curse, silver hair and a heart destined to break.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered to the child growing inside her, to the future she’d condemned before it could even draw breath. “I’m so sorry, little one. You’ll be magnificent and damned, and I’ll love you, anyway.”

The priestess had gone, leaving her alone with this terrible new knowledge. Another Merriweather woman, cursed before she was born, destined to love wrong and lose everything.

But she would be fierce, this daughter. She would have Kassander’s courage and her own stubborn refusal to surrender. Maybe that would be enough. Maybe love and stubbornness could overcome even the darkest curse.

Or maybe, she thought, watching the lighthouse burn against the Egyptian sky, that’s just what cursed women tell themselves to keep breathing.

That night, three more girls came. By week’s end, a dozen. They brought gold, jewels, locks of hair, broken promises solidified into offerings.

She cursed them all—the faithless lovers, the cruel husbands, the boys who promised forever and delivered Tuesday.

And each curse fed the original, the mother of them all, spreading through time like silver through her hair, like life through her womb.

Every Merriweather woman will love wrong.

The lighthouse burned on, steady as heartbreak, bright as the curse she’d birthed.

And Bebe—Cassandra now, curse-maker, heartbreak’s priestess, mother-to-be—burned with it, carrying the future in her belly and the weight of what she’d done in her silver-streaked hair.