Through Every Life to Find You

Rita Carr carries the bloodline of an old order of channelers, and she has died wrongly a hundred times over before returning as the true daughter of the Carr family. She comes into that house holding to customs nobody there has followed in generations, which makes her look like a relic to the servants until she uses what she knows on them and they stop laughing. Sisi, the girl who was raised in her place, and her younger brother close ranks against her. Rita breaks a curse laid in an incense burner, and her grandfather begins to take her seriously. A gang fight puts her in the path of Louie Bale, young head of the Aegis Syndicate, and she reads his future and warns him about it. At a birthday banquet for Louie's grandmother, Louie and the young leader of a rival gang quarrel over her, and the old woman announces in front of everyone that Rita is the granddaughter-in-law she has chosen. Rita asks for the engagement to wait. She gives herself three months to take control of the family business, breaks a freezing curse laid at the docks, allies the Carrs with two other houses against a trading company backed by the Krana Empire, and puts her family's trade back on its feet.