The door swung open to reveal a brawny stranger—one whose presence in the ladies’ quarters baffled Yvette until recognition struck.

Viscountess Perche’s footman? What business brings this stallion to the mares’ stable?

“Explain yourself,” demanded the Viscountess, though her rising color betrayed anticipation.

The footman’s smirk oozed provocation. “Came to serve my mistress proper. Unless”—his eyes raked Yvette—“this perfumed popinjay satisfies?”

Yvette’s cheeks burned. The man’s contemptuous once-over—pausing pointedly at her breeches—twinned with his vulgar snort. To this swaggering Adonis, she posed less threat than a gelded poodle.

The Viscountess tittered, transformed from scorned huntress to pantheress eyeing fresh kill. “My hungry beast,” she purred, dismissing Yvette with frosty finality. The door’s slam echoed like a gavel.

Hypocrite! Yvette stormed downstairs, recalling the lady’s earlier praise of her “ethereal delicacy” over “loutish muscle-men.” Yet her crimsoned bed linens—gossiped by maids—proved the footman’s regular service. A noble’s palate tires of venison, she consoled herself. But I’m no trifling syllabub—more... quail in verjuice! Let that oaf gorge on mutton pies!

Miss Moore intercepted her, agitation marring the companion’s usual composure. “No... complications, Mr. Fisher?”

“Save your overeager rescuing,” Yvette parried. “Had we progressed to climactic negotiations, your footman’s entrance might’ve proved... indelicate.”

“Better scandal than tragedy,” Miss Moore whispered, fleeing as if chased by hounds.

Dawn found the Viscountess vanished—a strategic retreat, Miss Veronika suggested with catty relish. “Grown bored of silvered sirens?” the girl prodded.

“Prefer cooler constellations,” Yvette deflected. “Scholars over courtesans.”

Veronika groaned. “Set your star-chart in Hades, then! Even Parisian salons barely tolerate bluestockings.” Their debate flowed into reformist zeal until Yvette excused herself to prowl the grounds.

A severed oak branch snagged her notice—too thick for wind-snap, its splintered end pointed like an accusation toward the Viscountess’ window. Gossip trickled forth from loose-lipped staff:

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* Bedding “resembling a bordello’s”

* Screams (of passion? punishment?) before dawn

* Mysterious midnight tree-crash that left neighbors sleepless... yet the Viscountess claimed undisturbed slumber

In London’s fog-cloaked streets, patterns emerged. The killer’s dumping sites formed a grotesque constellation—one aligning eerily with sewer tributaries. Retracing the current’s flow led...

To milady’s doorstep.

"The creature is here! Run—don’t let it take you!"

Viscountess Perche trembled in her locked chambers, her pulse drumming in her ears. It had all begun with a cursed secret—a forbidden recipe for eternal youth.

Years of powders and rouge had masked her fading beauty, but the mirror betrayed her: wrinkles carved around her eyes like cracks in porcelain. Doctors, charlatans, even aging courtesans—none could halt time’s march. Desperation led her to an underworld auction, where shadowy traders peddled horrors: mummified "honey-corpses" for healing, skull-brewed tonics once sipped by kings, and alchemical obscenities like powdered pharaohs.

The prize was a ragged parchment—a stolen page detailing an elixir of maiden’s blood and myrrh. Without hesitation, she ordered her maid to kidnap a street girl. Rosewater fasting, chest blood drawn mid-scream—the recipe demanded agony.

It worked. Her skin bloomed anew, while the imprisoned girl withered into a wrinkled husk. The "spent" girl was drowned in sewers, her body dumped into the Thames to mimic suicide. London’s river swallowed such tragedies daily.

Fortnightly, the ritual repeated. Youth flowed anew, until her discarded refuse drew a predator.

First, papers wrote of Thames corpses gnawed hollow. Then her disposal maid vanished. One sleepless night, she glimpsed it—a hunched, half-human abomination skulking in the garden. Bloodied fabric near its trail matched her maid’s dress. Panic crystallized: It ate the corpses… and now hungers for fresher meat.

Her wrinkles returned as fear paralyzed her. Salvation seemed to arrive in Moore—a drifter with no ties. But Moore’s stolen jewels revealed darker sins: a fugitive fence fleeing gang strife. Blackmail twisted her into an accomplice. Together, they fed bloodless victims to alley shadows, praying the beast stayed sated.

It didn’t. Ravenous, it prowled closer. Police swarmed the streets; whores hid after dark. Trapped, the viscountess fled to her nephew’s country home—only for the beast to clamber onto his oak like some grotesque arachnid. It followed. It demanded.

Back in London, she barricaded herself, yet the monster pressed its nightmare silhouette to her window, blotting out lamplit streets. Screams choked into unconsciousness.

Next dawn, resolve hardened. Moore—the last loose thread—was ambushed in the distillery. A gelatin capsule, fat with poison, would nest in her gut. Let the beast feast and perish.

But as the viscountess stirred her lethal brew, sudden drowsiness felled her.

Down the chimney slipped Yvette, investigator of sewers and secrets. Amid skeletal debris, she’d pieced the horror together. With a flick of the Nightmare Ring, slumber claimed the house—justice whispering through smoke-blackened bricks.