A/N: Hello! Just want to give a clear timeline for fans of my other Crescent City Werewolves stories. This story takes place about a year and a half before Secrets in the Moon. It's also very different in tone, with lusher prose and explicit sex. Thanks for reading!

A metropolis such as Crescent City has no reverence for fairy tales, although many compare it to a rose caught in the maw of a beast. The human districts of the city are lush and sensual, surrounded by the fangs of werewolf packs and their vicious alpha-kings. Yet the taste for decadence and the thirst for blood hold little reverence toward old fireside stories.

Curses are an archaic form of magic, treated with the same scorn as outdated maps showing the earth at the center of the galaxy. Love powerful enough to overcome all is a laughable idea; coin and reputation rule the hearts of Crescent City, nothing else. And Fate has become as forgotten as a relic in a museum's storage room, useless for a glittering life of cocktails, jazz, and thriving technology.

Only the strange circumstances of the Wheeler sisters elude rational explanation: Francine and Florence, daughters of the famed archeologist Simon Wheeler. Although he inspired books and plays with his adventures in hunting for lost ruins and their treasures, success couldn't prevent a plague of mysterious deaths that struck without warning. The drowning of a family friend who was about to become a son-in-law. The suicide of a wealthy patron that didn't seem quite right. And finally, a house fire that took the lives of Simon himself, as well as his dear wife.

The flames of gossip proved just as fierce, with many wondering whether the explorer had uncovered the wrong artifact and unleashed malicious magic upon his head. If Francine and Florence Wheeler knew anything, they never revealed it. The once pretty, vivacious girls faded into reclusive figures who rarely left their home—the very mansion in which their parents had died. As years passed, the border of rose bushes grew thicker and taller, thwarting outsiders from even a glimpse of the Wheeler home long after all curiosity faded.

Occasionally, a newspaper reporter tries to brave the roses and comes away with scratches instead of a story. Occasionally, a small child reaches for crimson petals only to be scared away when they bristle like living things. Old friends can't find a path to the front door. Milk is delivered to a back gate rusted shut.

In isolation, the sisters drift through the half-burnt shell of their home like ghosts in a graveyard, with seemingly nothing able to pierce their grief...