She did not think about the voice for years. Franca was too busy traveling the world, leaving a series of awed gentlemen and jealous courtesans in her wake. Her baggage piled up: she did not move with her stock of memorabilia, from the wondrous feathers an English explorer gifted her to the horns of narwhal a Norwegian Duke was so eager to impress her with.

She wrote home less and less. Her family dwindled – her father was devoured by a hidden illness, her mother died shortly after. Did she cry? Of course, but only a few tears. There were more important things to do, and with every journey, every dinner, every night of passion in the arms of this or that noble, the memories of her old life thinned and slowly disappeared, as if she had never been anything less than astonishing in her beauty.

Even as years piled up, she maintained her youthful appearance. She was twenty-two and her cheeks were just as rosy as they had always been. She blew the candles on her twenty-third birthday and yet she was a shining as the years before. Coming twenty-four, her hair had lost nothing of their luster.

Whispers began to accumulate about her: she was a witch, she was unnatural, she was dangerous. But as long as only scorned women gave them heed, she paid them no mind. Men were still more interested in what she could do for them with her beauty than wonder where it came from.

Still, slowly, like a fire that can’t grow larger than the wood that’s fueling it, on the seventh year since she had made her pact she found herself looking out of a window from a lovely apartment in London, looking down at the busy street, filled with horses and cabs. This was the center of the world, the heart of the British Empire, so far from that old stupid island that has held her prisoner for far too long. Beauty couldn’t carry her to the very top, but she found a nice-looking Earl comfortably sitting on a secondary branch of the royal family. He was loaded. This was but one of his houses, and they would soon leave for their country villa. He would be her husband, her family, soon.

By now, she only had a few relatives still living – the rest had all been consumed, one after the next like candles left in front of a bonfire.

Franca shifted her gaze from the street to her reflection: a stunningly beautiful woman with her fair skin, deep dark eyes and black hair, she was the definition of bewitching. She had stolen more than one husband with a look and a little turn of her thick lips, a slight tremor on her bountiful chest, a bump of her hips.

Still, there was a shadow upon her brow.

This book is hosted on another platform. Read the official version and support the author's work.

She had buried the memories of her pact for many years – but they had recently resurfaced and her recent engagement to the Duke was not just a matter of luck.

I can give you seven years, she had said.

Not one more.

Not one less.

It would be only a few weeks before the anniversary of the seventh year since her pact, and Franca was restless. She passed her hands over her stomach, where the fruit of her future husband’s love was already growing.

Your firstborn.

She bit her lip.

She was too far away. That voice, that entity, could not get her there. She was too far away, in the heart of the civilized world, not in a house lost in the midst of the woods.

She had heard stories of fairies and fey beings lost in the woods of England, but they could not compare to the sheer fear she heard every time a whiff of wind caressed her ear. Was that her voice? Had she come back to take what was due?

But every time it was just a figment of her imagination, nothing more than her own paranoia.

“I will not give it to you,” she said to the her reflection, putting both hand over her stomach. “I will not. This is mine.”

She had expected for a dark figure to appear behind her, grasp her neck and drag her into darkness.

Nothing came.

The clock kept counting seconds.

Nothing happened. Just like that night seven years before, no one was there with her.

Until the moment something would be.

Franca shivered in the warm room. She left the window, turning towards the stove. She was cold, and cold was not good for the child.

The next few weeks were even more miserable. She suffered mood swings, bad breath, cramps.

Even the marriage was not enough to satiate her worries.

On a July night, but a few days after she had stepped out of the church dressed in pearly white and enjoying the triumph of her life, she found herself sitting alone in the living room, in front of the ticking clock. Her husband had fallen asleep, helped by a few pills she had slipped into his wine.

She was alone.

The fire was crackling in the hearth, filling the room with comfortable heat and the soothing smell of burning wood. The shadows danced in the corners.

The clock ticked this way and that. She held her bloated stomach with both hands, shaking her head this way and that.

“He’s not yours,” she muttered. “Not yours. Not yours. Mine. I won’t give it.”

It would soon be midnight.

Minutes slithered down her back, cold and heavy like ice boulders.

The large hand reached the little one and the clock produced in its call. Twelve times it chimed.

As the echoes dissipated, Franca shifted her gaze towards the mirror.

Her hair was still as black as ever. Her eyes just as shining. Her figure just as perfect.

She was still beautiful.

“It’s gone,” she cackled, standing up on shaking legs. She stumbled towards the fire, laughing mad with relief. It could not get her. It would not. “It’s gone!”

She laughed and laughed until she cried.

Then she went back to bed, falling into easy sleep for the first time in months.

The next day she woke up next to her husband, just as beautiful and stunning as ever.

Franca grinned and patted her belly. Everything would be just fine.