The Ones Before

Joseon Korea, 1742. Hyunjae arranges everything, including herself. Her mother is arranging a marriage for her. She commissions a memorial portrait of her dead father from a painter who works only on the dead, and he looks at her a moment too long, and the arrangement does not survive it.

That is one story. There are two more.

Paris, 1893. Reine is the most looked-at woman in the city and the least seen. Painters compete for her. She has built an entire self out of being watched in the way she chooses, and she paints in private, work that is raw and strange and nothing like the composed woman on their canvases. Nobody is allowed to see it. Somebody is going to.

Tang Dynasty China, around 750. Liuyan guards merchants along the Silk Road, a blade for hire who has made her own body the one thing she can control completely. She has spent years being useful to people who never learn her name. Then one of them learns it, and keeps saying it.

Three women, three centuries, and a feeling none of them can name.

Each story is complete in itself, with its own era and its own ending. Read in order they begin to rhyme, and by the third you will be reading for the echo instead of waiting for it. Book Two carries the pattern back to where it started.

Book One of Perpetūra. Mature romance by Lacunae. Contains explicit sexual content. Intended for readers 18+.