Angelina Hathaway was a baby when her mother gave her up for adoption. Now eighteen years old, she meets Guillermo – a handsome, arrogant boy who was sent from Europe to tell her that she’s inherited a vast fortune from her birth parents along with an explosive secret about her lineage that will change her forever. Unfortunately, there are people who know her secret and will stop at nothing to control her for their own purposes, or even kill her. In order to escape, she must decide between those she can trust and those she can’t… before it’s too late.

Thank you, Olivia Cooper, for writing us a bonus chapter of Shadow! I mean, Ancient Egypt, murder, and death rites? We are in for one helluva treat. The novel is actually available for free on Amazon for the next week. Enjoy!

Death of a Pharaoh
Egypt – 2,970 B.C.
If only I had listened to my advisors.  They foretold my death.  They said that the stars predicted the murder of a great ruler.  And now, here I am.  Lying on my bed, dead, while the priests and holy women prepare my body for burial.

As I lay here, I wonder what I could have done to prevent this.  I knew that my son wanted the throne but I didn’t realize how impatient he was.  Of course, he would inherit the throne one day, but as a 14-year-old, I didn’t feel he was ready.  Having murdered my way onto the throne myself, I suppose I can’t blame him.  Ambition runs in the family.  I guess he was more ready to lead than I realized.

Perhaps I should have held him more as a baby and loved him more as a child instead of passing him off to his nannies and tutor.  He might have felt more love towards me.  But I had a nation to run and people to govern.  That doesn’t leave much time for the pleasures of motherhood.  I wonder if I should blame his nannies and tutor for this.  I would think that a child’s natural inclination is to love his mother.  I can’t help but think that they turned him against me.

My body has been prepared and I’m being carried into my tomb.  The priests lower me into my sarcophagus.  My body has been mummified and a death mask is placed over my face.  My tomb is full of my earthly possessions – vases, statues, paintings, jewelry.  They are placed next to me so that I will have them in the afterlife.

The red diamond necklace is placed inside the sarcophagus with me.  The red diamonds were pulled from a mine near my ancestral home and made into a necklace and earrings for my grandmother.  The largest diamond at the base is two inches long and an inch across.  They sparkle, even now, inside the dark crypt.  Some say that the gems are magic.  And now they’re being buried with me.  If there’s anything that I want to take into the afterlife with me, it’s this.

I hear the priests began their chants and prayers as they begin to seal the tomb.

“A curse on anyone who enters the tomb and disturbs the peace of our great Pharaoh.  A curse on anyone who defiles this tomb or steals the possessions of our great Pharaoh.  Death will come to those defy you, great Pharaoh, even in the afterlife.”

It takes five men to roll the large stone door closed.  I don’t panic but feel entirely at peace.  Two thousand years later, my rest is disturbed.  My sarcophagus is opened and everything is stolen from me, including my red diamond necklace and earrings.  The curse begins to seek its revenge…

I’ll keep you posted,