Some contracts are older than the paper they are written on.
For a hundred and eighteen years, five generations of Black perfumers on Dumaine Street and then Royal Street have blended the private scent of Pierre-Henri de Beaumont — a Creole vampire of the Garden District who paid twelve times market rate to keep their names off every document that touched his household. It was the only way, in 1908, that a small Black perfumer of New Orleans and a small white Creole vampire of three hundred and twenty-five years could work together at all.
In 1962, at a small low table in a small library, Célestine Aubin's grandmother asked Pierre-Henri to put the cinnamon down. He agreed. For sixty-four years he has worn a scent built without the note his own grandfather taught him in Saint-Domingue in 1683.
Now Pierre-Henri has written to Célestine — the fifth generation, thirty-one years old, at the bench alone since her mother's death in 2022 — and asked her to take the note back up. To restore what was put down. To do publicly what the architecture of the world would not, in her great-great-grandfather's time or in her grandmother's, permit them to name.
Célestine reads the letter. She recognises what it is. She walks up St. Charles in the August heat, and by the time she is at his gate she has decided.
She has five conditions.
But there is a sixth thing Pierre-Henri does not tell her — until a hurricane traps them in the same house four weeks later. A bond he made at her throat on the afternoon they signed the contract. Made by his kind's architecture of one thousand years, in which the mortal's consent was never part of the making. Made without asking.
What Célestine does with that information — and what Pierre-Henri does with the fact that he can no longer, in 2026, tolerate the architecture that let him do it — becomes the slowest-burning, most deliberate romance the Vienna Court has ever tried to file.
The Cinnamon Glass is a standalone paranormal romance about a scent put down for the wrong reasons and taken back up for the right ones — and about two people, across ten months and one hundred and eighteen years, quietly building an architecture of consent the Court of a thousand years did not have.
The Veiled Court — vampire houses, hundred-year contracts, and mortals who write their own terms.
Book One: The Blood Contract (Iris & Kasimir, London/Vienna)
Book Two: The Velvet Cage (Cosima & Lucian, Florence)
Book Three: The Cinnamon Glass (Célestine & Pierre-Henri, New Orleans)
Each book is standalone. Read in any order.
Genre: Romance
For a hundred and eighteen years, five generations of Black perfumers on Dumaine Street and then Royal Street have blended the private scent of Pierre-Henri de Beaumont — a Creole vampire of the Garden District who paid twelve times market rate to keep their names off every document that touched his household. It was the only way, in 1908, that a small Black perfumer of New Orleans and a small white Creole vampire of three hundred and twenty-five years could work together at all.
In 1962, at a small low table in a small library, Célestine Aubin's grandmother asked Pierre-Henri to put the cinnamon down. He agreed. For sixty-four years he has worn a scent built without the note his own grandfather taught him in Saint-Domingue in 1683.
Now Pierre-Henri has written to Célestine — the fifth generation, thirty-one years old, at the bench alone since her mother's death in 2022 — and asked her to take the note back up. To restore what was put down. To do publicly what the architecture of the world would not, in her great-great-grandfather's time or in her grandmother's, permit them to name.
Célestine reads the letter. She recognises what it is. She walks up St. Charles in the August heat, and by the time she is at his gate she has decided.
She has five conditions.
But there is a sixth thing Pierre-Henri does not tell her — until a hurricane traps them in the same house four weeks later. A bond he made at her throat on the afternoon they signed the contract. Made by his kind's architecture of one thousand years, in which the mortal's consent was never part of the making. Made without asking.
What Célestine does with that information — and what Pierre-Henri does with the fact that he can no longer, in 2026, tolerate the architecture that let him do it — becomes the slowest-burning, most deliberate romance the Vienna Court has ever tried to file.
The Cinnamon Glass is a standalone paranormal romance about a scent put down for the wrong reasons and taken back up for the right ones — and about two people, across ten months and one hundred and eighteen years, quietly building an architecture of consent the Court of a thousand years did not have.
The Veiled Court — vampire houses, hundred-year contracts, and mortals who write their own terms.
Book One: The Blood Contract (Iris & Kasimir, London/Vienna)
Book Two: The Velvet Cage (Cosima & Lucian, Florence)
Book Three: The Cinnamon Glass (Célestine & Pierre-Henri, New Orleans)
Each book is standalone. Read in any order.
Genre: Romance
Used availability for Danielle E Voss's The Cinnamon Glass