Blackthorn

The Hill has rules. She’s about to learn them well enough to break them.

Beacon Hill, May 1921. Vivienne Morrow, once a seventeen-year-old seamstress from Kneeland Street, wakes every dusk in a house full of vampires who regard her as an accident with good posture. The Elders tell her where to sit, how to turn, what she owes. Her maker teaches her the first law of the Hill: always know what a man owes before you trouble to learn what he wants.

She learns it. She learns all of it.

Across the city in Southie, Phelan keeps the old lines humming under the paving stones. He serves a straight pint to men who can’t legally order one, and he runs the cellar still because there are mouths to feed. He can’t tell a lie. He has never needed to, until she is three miles away and every true word he has is addressed to her.

Prohibition. The Crash. A rival nest in Hartford. A sewing circle of women who have never been afraid of a locked door. And an Angel of Death who refuses to carry a single message between two people who need him to.

Over twelve years, Viv builds a house of her own. Phelan builds a wall around the one thing he won’t say. In a city that charges for everything, the cost of love is exact.

THE BLACKTHORN is Book 2 in the Ask Me Again series, a slow-burn historical fantasy romance of Prohibition-era Boston.

For readers of A Discovery of Witches and The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue.