Alkohol

In a chandeliered Viennese ballroom where velvet domino masks flicker like fireflies above champagne flutes, Hella Swendsen—her silk gown the color of arterial blood—learns that the man she is to marry is the progeny of a woman who drank herself into an early grave. Betrothal snaps like a crystalline glass stem: the fiancé, repulsed by the mirrored thirst he spies in his own lineage, flees the engagement and the masquerade both. Left amid the swirling harlequins and powdered wigs, Hella is accosted by a stranger who claims the dead woman’s demise is inked on his conscience. Over the smoldering carcass of the night he unspools a tale of addiction, seduction, and collateral damage that re-casts the ballroom as a confessional and every pirouette as penance.