The Wanting House

Do you feel dead inside?

Five words in the back pages of Harper's Bazar, wedged between liver pills and rail fares. A respectable woman would have turned the page.

I sent a telegram instead.

Wake me.

Two thousand miles from Boston there's a house that shouldn't exist. A house where women like me come to be unmade. The men inside, and I use the word loosely, don't want my fortune or my name.

They only need my consent.

I chose Broderick. Ancient, Scottish and starving. He has never allowed himself to want, and I might be the one thing he cannot let go of. I thought I was the one taking the risk.

But something has been circling the Wanting House for a hundred years. Patient. Ravenous. Waiting on a threshold it could not cross uninvited.

I was its way in.

I was warned the Wanting House would ruin me for my old life.

No one warned me it might just be the death of me.