The 27 Murders of Marie Antoinette **Coming Winter 2020**

Intro: Before we begin...

To whomever should find these letters:

Forgive the shaky penmanship.

My hands are not the glorious instruments they used to be. I lay here, struggling to breathe at one hundred and four, weeks away from dropping into my grave, and I have been many things in my lifetime: a wife, a mother, a business woman. A whore.

And a murderess.

That final detail is a shock, to be sure. Take a moment, you'll require many more before you've reached the end of my life's journey. But before we begin, I want you to know that all you are about to read—however terrible, however beautiful in its darkness—is in fact true.

Every word.

Every bloody pause and final breath.

I have snatched the souls of many. Twenty-seven, to be precises, and I can feel their grave-cold fingers clawing for me. Inching closer. But before they drag me into the bitter earth to face their wrath, I pour what's left of me into ink and paper.

Will these pages rot inside their porcelain prison? Or find themselves liberated to be pondered over in the glorious light of a soft afternoon? Even now, as I lay here, with a mind sharp as the day I was born, trapped in a gnarled, festering prison I can't escape, I try to imagine you. My discoverer. The only soul living or dead who shall ever know me at my core.

Are you a man? A woman?

Be still my terrible heart, a child?

How truly ... thrilling to imagine these pages clutched between blunt, pudgy fingers of impressionable youth. Your eyes widening with fascination or confusion as you struggle to take in every violent word.

Does that make me especially cruel? to have such gleeful hope to know all that all that I am, rendered in indelible, bloody ink, is soaking into the dry sponge of a soft mind?

Will my words come to shape or haunt you?

I cannot pretend that I am not woefully saddened to never find out, but for your sake, my darling reader, I shall endeavor to leave no secret unearthed. No truth unexplored.

This shall be my only confession--and I will make it sing.

Ever thine,

Marie Antoinette

[Image description: Hand drawn portrait of historical noble woman wearing a black veiled mask]

**AN**

So I had this idea. This dark and CRAZY idea. I've always wanted to go darker (if you'd ever ready my teenage vampire books you'd know I have a deep, dark corner in my mind that is just WOW). Def very different from anything I've shared with you all.

LET ME KNOW if this is something that intrigues and excites you!!***