Most people know me as Kaelynn Carroll, Theo's fiancée, and curator of the New York Museum of Art. A name that appears on plaques and donor lists. A woman associated with common sense, climate‑controlled halls, and objects stored safely behind glass.

What they don't know-what very few can see-is the thing that stirs beneath that name, that surface A monster of hunger and anger, a sickness passed down like an inheritance. A Pandora's Box buried so deep even I believed it could be forgotten.

It began simply enough. A routine trip to Britain to catalog a sixteenth‑century collection of art and antiques, the familiar quiet of history waiting to be labeled and filed away. I had no reason to think this would be anything other than work.

I was wrong.

Between the darkness beneath that museum and the long flight home, something escaped. Time was stripped. Memory resurfaced. I lived another life, another reality, one that ran parallel to my own like a shadow cast by a different sun.

And in my ignorance, in my certainty that I was in control, I opened a door that never should have been opened.

Whatever had been buried there, whatever had waited centuries for a careless hand like mine, it followed me back, took root. And now it burns beneath my skin like a raging fire, a hunger out of control, urging to be set free.

And all the King's horses and all the King's men could not quench the terrible darkness that rages within…