The Beginning

Kleio has spent nineteen years surviving inside someone else's life. She knows the rhythm of the estate, the weight of the grinding stone, the particular silence of a household still asleep. She knows how to make herself indispensable and how to make herself invisible. She knows, without ever saying it out loud, that she loves the woman she serves.

When Ianthe dies in childbirth, Kleio's world rearranges itself around the absence of her. The grief is familiar. The anger underneath it is new.

Lykos has worked the orchard for as long as anyone can remember. He is warm in a way that runs slightly too hot. He knows things he shouldn't. He says her name like he has been saying it for longer than he has known her. And he has never once, in eight years of finding his way to her bed, pretended that it was nothing.

Kleio doesn't examine those things too closely. She never has.

But as her thirtieth birthday approaches and the life she was supposed to have waits somewhere beyond the estate walls, something is building underneath the ordinary rhythm of her days. Something that started long before she arrived. Something that has been watching her for longer than she knows.

The Hairpin is the first story in The Board series: a tale of love, grief, devotion, and the specific cost of giving your whole life to a cause someone else designed.