The Tale of Frida: Part One The Tale of Frida, #1

Some curses don't announce themselves. They wait for the full moon.

London, 1552. Frida is eight when robbers leave her parents dead and her left for dead beside them. She survives, but the city that nearly killed her isn't where she's raised. In Waltham Forest, her grandmother takes her in, and a hunter named James teaches her to track, to ride, to draw a bow with a hand that doesn't shake.

By fourteen, the forest feels like home. So does Luca, a boy she's falling for, who doesn't know what sleeps inside him until the full moon wakes it. What happens that night leaves her grandmother dead, Luca gone, and a scratch on Frida's shoulder she barely thinks twice about. She flees to London with nothing but the conviction that no one will believe what really happened in those woods, and a question she takes straight to God, demanding to know what she's done to deserve this.

Heaven doesn't answer. The next full moon does.

What rises in her is still Frida, the believer, but also the wolf sharing the body. She builds a life in the shadows, a fragile routine held together by faith and sheer refusal to become the monster she fears she already is.

Until one night, a woman in red walks into the wrong alley. And everything Frida promised God she would never do, she does.

The Tale of Frida is a gothic origin story about a girl caught between the faith she won't let go of and the curse that won't let go of her.