“I know how upset you’ve been since your father died, my dear,” Lawrence Gould said to Seona Kerrich with what sounded like a friend’s genuine concern. “If you needed help with handling his estate, all you had to do was call me.”

“I’m fine.” How many times had she used that word in the last month, she wondered. Her life seemed to orbit it like a wobbly satellite: This is fine. That will be fine. Everything is fine.

“You ran away to Scotland.” Something buzzed, and her agent made an impatient sound. “I have to take another call. Hold on.”

As homogenized music came over the line, Seona placed her cases in the closet and went to open the curtains of her hotel room. She wondered what Lawrence would do if she ever really asked him for help.

Probably charge me another fifteen percent plus expenses while blaming me for the problem and expecting me to bail myself out.

This afternoon Inverness looked busy for such a small city, with cars and pedestrians occupying the streets and sidewalks everywhere. To her right, Inverness Castle sat on its cliff, a stately red sandstone relic occupying an embattled spot where its predecessors had stood and fallen since the eleventh century. It seemed to watch over the River Ness, which wound through the city like some mammoth turquoise snake, wide and sparkling, fed by the infamous loch of the same name.

Compared to gray, gloomy Manhattan, Scotland seemed as quaintly pretty as a postcard from the forties.

The room smelled of sun-dried linens, but outside Seona had picked up a briny scent in the chilly air. The sea lay somewhere northeast of her, and even with the window closed and the happy song playing over the phone she could hear the raucous cries of seagulls. Fall here, like in Canada, had some teeth to it, but she guessed winters would be even colder.

“You left without a word to anyone,” Lawrence said as soon as he came back on the line. “Why on earth would you do this now?”

His tone had shifted from friendly concern to paternal disapproval, with a dash of long-suffering exasperation. He wanted her to explain herself, but only so he could pick apart whatever she said. Usually she could avoid being cornered that way, but she had been awake since one a.m. last night, spending the last twelve hours in the air. Trying to decide what to do before she’d left the States had kept her chronic insomnia well-fed with doubt.

All she wanted to do was drop and not move again for eight hours, but first she had to deal with this man and his endless need to make money off her.

“I don’t need your permission to travel, Lawrence.” She sat down on the edge of the bed and slipped her feet out of her black courts. Her small toes looked bruised. “I e-mailed my proof revisions to the editor before I left. That was my last project.”

He sucked in some air through his teeth. “You’ve forgotten about the script for the documentary series.” His faux concern became very real anxiety as he asked, “Did you look over the contract? They offered very generous terms. I don’t want to miss out on this gig, and the producers are getting tired of waiting for our response.”

Our response.

Lawrence always talked as if they were in this together, but in reality he had no involvement in her actual work. For the privilege of having him as her agent Seona paid him a hefty percentage of every dime she earned. In return he glanced over her contracts, often missing problems, and promoted her to various industry publications while actually crediting himself for her success. His primary occupation was selling her skills for top dollar to whoever wanted them without first consulting her. This time he’d done that while she had been burying her father.

Telling Lawrence she had no interest in writing for television would be the same as kicking him where it really hurt guys.

“I brought the contract with me,” she lied. “I’ll call you after I’ve read it.”

“Do you think you’re the only historian who can write, Seona?” Before she could reply her agent sighed heavily. “You’ve simply been lucky. I rep half a dozen guys with better credentials and more writing experience. You’re not some stupid romance writer, so stop having hysterics and come back.”

They had reached the insults stage of the game. Next he would start questioning her mental stability and blame her anxiety disorder, which of course none of his male authors had. If she had been poor he would have used income as his weapon, but Forbes had just listed her as one of the richest women in North America. Going after her self-esteem was his only option.

“I’ll call you when I get back to New York. Good-bye.” She switched off the phone before she lay back on the bed and stared at the wooden slats of the ceiling.

Her tired eyes burned, and her legs and back ached from sitting still for so long. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d eaten a real meal or slept for longer than two hours. She needed to take care of herself, Seona knew, because no one else would. Her agent’s self-serving nastiness faded as her father’s advice began to march across her mind like a stock market update.

Never love. Never marry. Never have children.

From childhood Seona had been fascinated by books and history, which ultimately guided her to becoming a historian. She’d decided to write about Scotland, from which her family had immigrated in the eighteenth century, as she never tired of learning about the history of that diminutive, defiant country. She’d also had a gift with making the past come alive with her writing. That knack had persuaded an editor at her university’s small press to make an offer.

“Not a lot of people read history books anymore,” the editor admitted when he’d talked to her about the contract, which would put her book out in electronic format along with a limited number of print copies. “So don’t expect too much in the way of royalties.”

Six months later Seona’s first book had climbed to the top of the bestseller lists, having sold so many copies she had become an overnight success.

Contract offers had poured in after that, and with every book she wrote her popularity only grew. Some critics predicted she would follow in the footsteps of Doris Kearns Goodwin and Barbara W. Tuchman; others chastised her for only focusing on Scottish history. When she was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, Lawrence had even advised her against attending any pre-award events. When she had won, he’d paraded her around New York as if she were his next trophy wife. Every other writer suddenly began pestering her to know her secret. Had her rich father bought the award for her? Did she have connections with the committee members?

No one wins a Pulitzer on their feet, Sweetie, one journalist-turned-biographer had told her at yet another literary luncheon. So who did you blow?

After a week of celebratory appearances, Seona left New York and fled to Toronto, a city she’d always loved. There she stayed for the next five years. She did accept some invitations to lecture at universities, as she loved talking with students, but otherwise she refused to make any more public appearances. She published a children’s fairytale book based on Scottish history, something that had absolutely infuriated her agent, and then began pouring through her family’s history to learn more about her own roots.

All of that had come to a screeching halt two months ago, when her father had called to tell her that he was dying of cancer, and that she had to come home.

During his lifetime, Carlyon Kerrich had parlayed his inheritance of his father’s considerable wealth into stock investments that had earned him close to a billion dollars. He’d also married Seona’s mother, who had been the heiress to an international real estate conglomerate. Grace Kerrich had also suffered from a rare form of epilepsy since childhood, and only lived long enough to see Seona’s third birthday before her disease killed her. After that Seona had been raised by nannies until she grew old enough to be sent to boarding school. Aside from some brief visits home for the holidays, she’d actually had very little contact with Carlyon.

After that terrible phone call, Seona had hurried back to Manhattan, hoping that perhaps she would finally have a chance to spend some meaningful time with her father. Instead she found the tall, robust man she barely knew had become bed-ridden and terribly thin from multiple rounds of chemotherapy and radiation. He had smiled a little when she’d come into his library, which had been converted to a hospital room.

I’m glad you’re home, Daughter. His mouth stretched, transforming his face into a skin-covered skull. I’m told that I don’t have much time left, and I need to tell you the truth.

Carlyon had told her a fantastic, ridiculous story that Seona initially suspected came from being on painkillers for months. He lived another three days after that, and then had suffered a stroke and died in his sleep. Seona obeyed his wishes to forego a service and buried him next to her mother, a funeral that only she was to attend. A lifelong atheist, Carlyon had refused to have anyone pray over his grave.

After the funeral Seona had met with her father’s attorney, who informed her that she had inherited her parents’ combined fortunes. He then read her father’s will, which directed her to retrieve some family heirlooms from a high-security bank vault, and follow the directions he had left in a letter stored with them. Resigned to carrying out Carlyon’s last wishes, Seona went to the bank and was given the keys to a locker-size box, in which she had found a sword, a scroll, and the story of a mysterious tragedy that dated back to fourteenth-century Scotland.

 Do as I say, and the curse die with you, Daughter.

Seona didn’t want to think about the damn scroll, so she pushed herself off the bed, hung the Do Not Disturb sign on her room door, and went into the bathroom. After splashing her face with cold water she took one of her pills before regarding her reflection. Inheriting her mother’s milky skin with her father’s black hair had long ago earned her the usual nicknames at school: Oreo, Plasterface, and, of course, Snow White. Her fairness made her big blue eyes and naturally red lips stand out even more. In college she’d tried every self-tanner on the market to give her face more color, and layered on neutral makeup to mute her dramatic features.

Jared Thomson, her first and only love, had been the one to persuade her to stop.

“So you don’t look like the other girls,” he scoffed after she reluctantly told him why she never left the house without makeup. “Why would you want to blend in? You’re gorgeous just the way you are.”

She’d thought about Jared too often since her father had passed. Her dead boyfriend had stayed in her thoughts rent-free for years because he had been the only person to ever love her without reservation. By now they probably would have been married with a couple of kids, as he had always wanted a family, a dog and a home in the country. Because his happiness had mattered to her even more than her own she would have given him his dream life—if fate or karma or bad luck hadn’t stepped in between them.

Seona couldn’t really blame Jared for not keeping his promises to her. If he hadn’t been trying to work his way up to the big leagues, she knew they would be together and happy now. If he hadn’t been an aggressive player who liked crowding the plate, he wouldn’t have gotten hit in the face. If that minor-league pitcher hadn’t been able to throw baseballs that flew through the air at a hundred miles an hour, that one fastball wouldn’t have killed Jared.

If Seona hadn’t been cursed from birth, Carlyon had told her from his deathbed, Jared would still be alive.

Never love. Never marry. Never have children.

As her anti-anxiety medication would take a while to start working, Seona turned on the shower and stripped. Standing under the lukewarm spray, she closed her eyes and tried to let the unhappy memories melt away with the travel-induced weariness. She hadn’t come to Scotland to mourn or have another panic attack; she’d do what she had planned. Hopefully that would help her make peace with her family’s questionable past.

After toweling off and pulling on the hotel courtesy robe Seona went out and opened the closet to look at the long, padded case in which she had stowed the sword. She hadn’t touched it since removing it from the bank vault in New York City; her father had warned her in his last letter to avoid handling it too much.

Our ancestor Ian Kerrich stole the Fire Sword from the MacRoss Clan before he left the highlands. He passed it down to every generation after him along with the scroll. It has always brought the Kerrich wealth and power. It’s also the reason our family is cursed.

The power of belief was as strong or stronger than any curse, but Seona really didn’t want to touch the sword. Just looking at it made her uncomfortably hot, as if she were coming down with the flu. Tomorrow she would take the blade to what was left of Dun Lasair, the highlands stronghold that had once belonged to the MacRoss. There, where the ghosts of the massacred clan were rumored to haunt the ruins, she would bury what Ian had stolen from them.

Maybe then the sins of her forefathers might finally be forgiven.