The House That Loved Her

"''Most inheritances come with wealth. Mine came with an unaging caretaker, blood on the floorboards, and a mansion that gets jealous.''"

Struggling novelist Wren Holloway thought inheriting Blackthorn House was her escape from eviction notices and a stalled career. The only catch? A testamentary clause that demands she reside within its crumbling Victorian walls. But thirty-four rooms of gothic gloom are far from empty. Corridors stretch and rearrange overnight, fresh tea appears in locked chambers, and the stone foundations pulse with an unnatural, hungry warmth that seems to watch her every move. Then there is Elias Thorne. Brooding, lethal, and devastatingly guarded, the estate’s caretaker looks thirty-two, yet records prove he has walked the grounds for decades without aging a single day. He warns her away from the locked eastern wing, shadows her every step with ferocious, touch-her-and-die intensity, and looks at her with an agonizing ache, as if mourning a ghost he lost centuries ago. Elias is physically chained to the property by a curse that seizes his heart whenever he nears the gates, and the closer they get, the more violently the mansion awakens. When a portrait from 1897 surfaces showing a doomed Victorian bride with Wren’s exact face locked in Elias’s arms, the nightmare unravels: Wren isn't the first woman he has loved inside this house, and she isn't the first destined to bleed. Blackthorn House is an architectural parasite. It feeds on devotion, manufacturing repeating cycles of passionate love and sudden tragedy to feast on Elias’s eternal grief. With predatory developers closing in from the outside and the walls demanding another sacrifice, Wren must unearth the secrets buried in the bedrock before the clock resets. But the greatest danger isn't the shifting stone, it’s surrendering to the immortal protector who would burn the world to ash before letting a single ember touch her.