"I think I'm madly, passionately, entirely, and ardently in love with you, my love," Lady Veroniqué breathed, her lips brushing against the thick sewn flesh ones of the monster's.
Her palm hovered lightly above his muscled chest, and she felt heat radiate off of him in waves, engulfing her form completely. His hand, mighty and thick, brushed against her back, shaking and careful, desperately wanting to touch her.
He grunted low, and her breath hitched, her eyes half closed.
༄
𝘼 𝙘𝙤𝙪𝙧𝙩𝙚𝙨𝙖𝙣 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙖 𝙢𝙖𝙣-𝙢𝙖𝙙𝙚 𝙢𝙤𝙣𝙨𝙩𝙚𝙧.
The year is 1860,
In the glittering, fractured realm of Wonderland's White Palace, where whimsy hides razor-sharp secrets, Veroniqué serves The White Queen, a twenty-five-year courtesan of frost and fire, caught between two worlds and burdened with tasks that have her slipping between Wonderland and the the human world.
Sent into the gaslit labyrinth of Victorian London, on a task she's unsure of, Veroniqué stumbles across a horror in a lab underneath a nobleman's house. Stitched from flesh and nightmare, a creature born of forbidden science and arcane sorcery, a colossus trapped between life and death. Entranced, and curious, she frees the man-made monster and brings him to Wonderland-an unsettling giant of silence and shadow.
With her gleaming white hair and whispered grace, finds herself inexplicably drawn into the mighty beast's cold orbit, falling fiercely into a love as unnatural and volatile as the world they inhabit.
As Wonderland's delicate balance threatens to shatter under the weight of old betrayals and new dangers, Veronique must navigate the impossible-teaching the unteachable, loving the unlovable, and facing a darkness that twists even the brightest dream into a waking nightmare. Here, in a world where madness waltzes with reason, and love may be the deadliest enchantment of all, the line between salvation and ruin is as thin as a knife's blad
Elizbeth Anne Humphrey wants a husband.
Her expectations are not outlandish; all she asks is that he be reasonably handsome, reasonably wealthy and completely kind. Her brothers have offered their assistance, and it's given her hope that perhaps there is a man out there who might want her for a wife. But alas, the first man she meets after recommitting to the battle against spinsterhood is reasonably handsome, reasonably naked and completely soaked through and stranded on their front steps. He also has a head-wound and no memory of who he is, but Elizabeth Humphrey has larger mysteries to solve; namely, the mystery of who she might marry.
Wattys 2022 Entry
Completed: March 2022 (~83000 words)