Klondike’s Price
Copyright© 2026 by Heel
Chapter 1: The Road to the Klondike
Vanessa had always been told she was too small for big dreams. A petite girl with quick hands and a quicker smile, she’d grown up in the backstreets of a tired port town where fog rolled in like unpaid debts. Her mother scrubbed laundry for sailors; her father, long gone, had left behind only a broken harmonica and an unshakable restlessness.
By the winter of 1897, gold fever had swept through every tavern, every dock, and every whispering corner of the city. The Klondike, they said, was spilling riches into the hands of anyone bold—or desperate—enough to go north. Men sold everything they owned for a pickaxe. Women took to sewing tents, selling maps, or following the prospectors in hopes of something shinier than gold: a better life.
Vanessa had no pickaxe. What she had was an old upright piano in the corner of Mrs. Hargreeves’s boarding house parlor and fingers that could stumble through a waltz if she tried hard enough. Music had never come naturally—her timing wobbled, her chords were uncertain—but she had a gift rarer than talent: charm. When she smiled and leaned her head just so, even her wrong notes seemed to make people laugh instead of wince.
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