Declan Voss excavates the dead for a living. He is good at it. Methodical, precise, emotionally sealed off in all the ways a man who has been carrying grief for years learns to be. The burial site at the deconsecrated church in the Tennessee hill country is supposed to be work. Bones, documentation, grid coordinates. Nothing that can touch him.
Then he finds Maren.
Maren has tended the souls beneath this soil through plague years and wars and the long forgetting of history. He is bound to the dead. He does not speak wants. He barely remembers having them. Then a forensic anthropologist sets up camp in the collapsed nave and starts methodically unearthing what Maren has spent four centuries protecting, and centuries of silence suddenly feels like the loneliest thing in the world.
Declan builds walls out of careful distances. Maren has never learned to want anything. Neither of those facts survives contact with the other. And beneath their collision, something older and far more dangerous has begun to stir in the ground — a presence bound in the same plague-year rite that made Maren what he is, patient and furious and ready to surface.
Late autumn Tennessee. A crumbling church. A grad student who refuses to let her advisor lie to himself. And two men learning to choose the living — even when both of them belong to the dead.
Contains explicit MM romance, dark themes including death, grief, and supernatural horror elements, slow burn heat, gothic atmospheric tension, and emotionally intense storylines. Intended for adult readers 18+. Standalone — no cliffhanger
