Love's Resurrection, A Deadly Game

My butcher shop smelled of iron and chilled meat, a clean, sharp scent I' d known my whole life.

Most people in this small town saw me, Lisa, as the butcher with the pretty face and strange eyes. They whispered, but I didn' t care.

Whispers don' t pay the bills, but a new client' s offer of twenty thousand dollars as a deposit for an "Underworld Matchmaker" job certainly did. Two hundred thousand more upon completion. It was enough to change my life.

The job: perform a ritual for her supposedly deceased son, Alexander Dubois, to secure his family' s spiritual line and fortune.

But then I saw the photo. My stomach dropped.

It was Alex, the man who' d vanished from my life five years ago, the struggling artist I' d once loved. Yet, the death certificate listed him as Alexander Dubois, with a different birthdate. His eyes in the photo, full of that familiar charming light, stared back at me, shattering my world.

This wasn' t just a high-paying job; it was a trap. The woman who claimed to be his mother was entangled in a web of lies.

I knew, with chilling certainty, that the spirit I was summoned to match was not just "resistant"-it was alive. They weren't asking me to perform a ritual for the dead; they were trying to make me an accomplice to murder.

My heart pounded furiously. This was no longer just about money or old traditions. This was about Alex, about unraveling the truth, and about surviving the deadly game the Dubois family was playing right into my grandmother' s special plan.