METHOD OF MADNESS ━ 𝐓𝐡𝐨𝐦𝐚𝐬 𝐒𝐡𝐞𝐥𝐛𝐲 ¹ (Under editing)

𝓟𝓻𝓮𝓯𝓪𝓬𝓮:

ᴺᴼᵂ ᴾᴸᴬᵞᴵᴺᴳ : flawless - the neighbourhood

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❝PREFACE ❞

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Small Heath, Birmingham

IN THE ashen veins of Small Heath, Marianna James bloomed like a pale rose cracking through soot-stained stone.

Her parents' house—humble, smoky, smelling of stew and candle wax—was a fragile kingdom built on her mother's superstitious whispers and her father's reckless dealings with men who smiled with knives behind their teeth. Her mother carried the lore of scents and spells, able to coax fortunes from herbs and perfumes, while her father, equal parts brute and poet, turned every winter into a theatre of danger and devotion. Together they spun a sanctuary in the frost, love stitched to survival, laughter pressed against fear.

Marianna was the jewel in that fragile fortress.

Mal, her elder brother, five years her wall and shield, adored her with a loyalty that felt almost priestly. He scavenged paints, brushes, scraps of paper, as if the world's salvation depended on her scribbles and colours. He called her Mar Belle, a name uttered like prayer, a French whisper that made her feel less like a child and more like a creature meant for worship, for ruin.

The spirits told her—soft, gnawing murmurs that threaded themselves into her nights—that beauty was both weapon and burden. They told her men would carve themselves into monsters for it. She listened. She smiled. She filed it away like a sharpened blade.

At school, she collected friendships like charms, and one in particular lodged itself firmly in her palm: John Shelby. A boy with a grin like sunlight fractured on glass, freckles splashed across his face as though God had played careless with him. He made her laugh, made her feel ordinary in a world that demanded she be anything but. He was warmth, shelter, a loyal dog who barked at shadows on her behalf.

And it was through John that she first saw him.

The older brother. Tommy.

Five years felt like a gulf, and yet when he walked into the room, all gulfs collapsed. His face was carved in frost, eyes carrying the ruin of some battle already lost, some betrayal already catalogued. He was pale like John, but stripped of all innocence, as if God had drawn the same blueprint twice and set fire to the second draft. Marianna looked at him once, and the voices in her head shifted, whispering in urgent, spectral tones. That one.

She felt it then—an unsettling chill, as though the floor had shifted beneath her and the world had grown teeth. Her lips parted, breath trembling between awe and something darker. Only one word surfaced, delicate yet poisonous, like a petal soaked in blood. Chilling.

And though her heart quivered, her mind sharpened. She knew this man—this boy not yet a man, with death already lounging in his gaze—was not merely someone she had met. He was someone she had been promised.