The Drowning Truth

'Monsters shouldn't have faces'

But they wear my masks.

A marionette bending to the will of her buyers strings. Playing right into their little dance. Until i realised it wasn't a game and i was an expendable pawn.

A rough pair of hands snapping my head back at a weird angle gave me that clarity. Dragging my limp body away before I even hit the ground.

In the bitter winter of 1888, Cassandra Thawne vanished from her family estate. To the world of heavy skirts and caged smiles laced with poison, she was a flighty girl escaping her father's doting care.

But her sister's hunch that it was a cover up got out of hand as a trail of stolen correspondence urged an application for Blackwater. The one place a lady cannot go.

Sheared hair and donning her brother's discarded uniform did NOTHING to dissuade Julian, a persistent meddler in her late night searches. Who'd saw through her act the moment she set foot in his territory. Just her luck, that this dogged man was illustrious, magnetic and unpredictable.

The student party hung on his word like it was gospel and her professors couldn't praise him enough. Elara knew there was more to him. He spoke to her as an enigma would. A dusty book begging to be cracked open.

"You're out late, Thawne," Julian whispers, his voice vibrating in the small space she was occupying, grating on her nerves. He didn't look at her yet, but his hand lingered on the shelf, effectively pinning them in. "Or should I say you're up to no good, looking for something that doesn't want to be found?" he scoffs, staring down at her with a heated glare.

"Maybe it's a someone," she sneered up at him, her retort dripped with malice, hoping to puncture his rotten heart. He seemed so taken aback by her vicious response that he offered no resistance as she shoved past, not sparing him another second.