The Corpse Bride's Pact

Summary

It was the seventh day since I’d faked my own death to escape the gilded cage of The Silk Sparrow pleasure house.

To save my dying parents, I’d taken on a piece of dirty work: a Corpse-Right, a deathbed union with a fallen soldier to claim a widow’s stipend.

The battlefield was a charnel house, the air thick with the iron tang of blood. I was shoved before a knight who had just breathed his last.

“Get on with it,” the procurer, a grim man named Gris, snarled. “We need to consummate the union before he’s cold and stiff. If we can’t get his seed, we get nothing.