The Guardian Mist Read Online Free Page A

had been handed down from mother to daughter for as long as anyone could remember was on Cassia’s mind almost every day of her life. The poesy ring was nothing special to look at. Dark gold with a gray-colored stone that legend says might be some sort of really dark ruby. But her mom had tried to polish it more than once and it never looked anything but gray. A dark, disturbing color that made it hard to look at.
    The legend of the ring maintained it should be passed down from mother to eldest daughter. The stone would turn a brilliant crimson when each woman found her true love, but it had to happen before she turned a quarter of a century old. If she didn’t, the ring would turn dark and stay that way, making it impossible for the owner to ever find true love in her lifetime.
    Cassia grunted as the nurse encouraged her to push just one more time and looked up to her mother.
    Juno Velt was an unhappy woman. As was her mother and also her mother. Unhappiness ran rampant in their family, as if each generation made it a goal to make the next as miserable as possible.
    Cassia had done all she could to find her true love, as the legend foretold, but in the end, had found nothing but bitterness and misery.
    She hadn’t ever wanted to get pregnant, wanting to end the curse once and for all. Not having a daughter to pass the ring to would certainly do that—but the Roman gods had taken that decision out of her hands.
    Despite being religious about birth control with Bobby and making him wear a condom every time they had sex, she’d ended up pregnant anyway, a year after they’d moved in together.
    Of course it had been a daughter.
    Of course Bobby hadn’t wanted anything to do with a baby and had split.
    Of course her mom had been pissed.
    It was Juno who’d had the not-so-great idea that maybe if they sent the baby away with the ring, it might end the curse for all of them.
    That didn’t work.
    Theodosia’s damned ring haunted Cassia’s dreams and wouldn’t let her rest, even after she’d given away her firstborn. She knew Theodosia and Lucius’ story; of course she did. Juno had told her the fairytale so many times when she was little, Cassia could recite it by memory by the time she was four.
    Still, for a time, Cassia had managed to push the fact that she’d given away her baby to the back of her head, ignoring the dreams she had each night of swords, Roman soldiers and castles, and going on with her life.
    But apparently ancient curses didn’t care about rules…because she’d been knocked up again. This time by a one-night stand. With twins. Twin girls .
    Karma was a bitch.
    Cassia wasn’t the smartest woman in the world, but when the dreams increased in intensity and she saw the ring in every single one, even she knew she was getting a second chance, whether she wanted it or not.
    A second chance to help her new eldest daughter find love and free them all from the curse.
    “One more push and your first daughter will be here!” the nurse enthused.
    Easy for her to say. She wasn’t lying on an uncomfortable bed with her legs strapped into stirrups and her cooter on display to any doctor, intern, and orderly who happened to walk into the room.
    Cassia pushed thoughts of the ring and the curse out of her mind, and concentrated on the nurse’s directions to push.
    Ten minutes later, Cassia watched as the nurses wiped, dried, soothed, and sucked icky fluids from the mouths and bodies of her two healthy daughters.
    “Make sure you mark the oldest,” she told one of the nurses.
    “What?”
    “Mark the oldest. I have to make sure I know which came first.”
    “Of course,” the nurse said as she weighed one of the newborns. “We’d do that anyway. We’ll note it on her bracelet.”
    Cassia didn’t know why, but she felt the need to explain herself to the nurses. “I need to make sure the oldest is differentiable from the younger one. It’s a long story, but there’s a lot of family history, involving