Monsters don’t scare Gean Choo. And there are monsters aplenty among the Europeans on sultry Singapore island, all of them running away from something—or someone.

When she starts her new job as a lady’s companion, she can’t imagine falling for the impassioned, demanding mistress of Ambrosia Hall, nor the gruff, brooding woman who serves as her lady’s majordomo.

The latter holds her heart; the former, her body, blood, and loyalty.

Both want her.

Both need her.

And one of them will die for her. 

The Wicked and the Willing is a standalone, F/F steamy historical gothic horror vampire novel with a love triangle and a choice of endings. This novel contains two mutually exclusive endings, although most of the story is not interactive. Due to the mature content and dark themes, the book is intended for adult readers only. The full novel contains potentially disturbing scenes including graphic rape and torture, and an abusive romantic relationship between two women. The following is an excerpt of the first two chapters.

Content tags for this excerpt: blood, violence, cliffhanger.

MOVING OUT

Saturday, 12 March 1927

On the day when everything changed, Gean Choo sold the last of her mother’s belongings—a silver hairpin adorned with a butterfly. The jewellery shop was warm inside, lamps hovering over a wealth of riches in burnished gold and silver, trapped beneath glass. The clerk was a Eurasian man with wide dark brows and curly hair, skin a shade of bronze. He was leaning over a ledger on the counter, pen in hand, but straightened when he saw her.

“Back again?” he asked in English.

Ordinarily she would’ve smiled at him, dropping her voice to a soft and hesitant near whisper, but she couldn’t find the patience for those feminine arts today, meagre as they were. The woman on the pallet opposite her own had kept her up all night by coughing, bad enough it’d sounded like she’d been trying to hack up a piece of her lung.

Gean Choo drew the hairpin from her head, ripping out a few hairs along with it. When she held it out upon her palms, its lace butterfly shivered its wings. “How much?”

The clerk set out his scales and loupe. There was no one else in the shop, so he took his time with the assessment, making a small mark in his notebook.

Gean Choo stared at the width of the butterfly’s thorax and the tiny bumps of its eyes. A woman wore her wealth on her person. It was her security against a future with no sons to nurture her, no family to serve as her bulwark and shield. In happier times, the pin had shone against her mother’s hair, silver against black, the slightest movement making the wings quiver as though about to take flight.

“Three dollars, seventy-two cents,” the clerk said.

“You must think I’m bodoh.”

“It’s not even sterling.”