Two centuries ago he wrote a letter to a Florentine binder. The binder framed it.
His granddaughter inherited her grandfather's bench, his eye, his hands — and walked, unknowing, into the palazzo where the letter still hangs opposite a vampire's bed.
Cosima Sereni has been carrying a secret for fourteen months.
A Vatican official is holding her brother. The price of his return is a single act of theft from a Court vampire whose library she has been quietly restoring for half a year. The night she's meant to take the ledger, she decides — at the third turn of the binding in her hands — that she will not. She does not, in deciding, know that the man across the corridor has been watching from a chair beside the fire.
Lucian Orsini has been waiting for her in some private corner of his own attention for twenty-two years.
He bought a framed letter at auction in February 2004 — a letter he himself had written, in 1992, to a Florentine binder whose work he could read across centuries. He hung it opposite his bed without knowing why. He knows now.
What follows is the architecture of a contract drawn in eighteenth-century ink. A brother brought home by a vampire's hand in a hall in Castellammare. A bond made by a mortal's own asking on the evening of the third night. And the question of what a binder of twenty-eight can decide, at the chair on the right of the fire, when the man who has been the architecture of her fear for fourteen months comes to the front door at one in the afternoon and asks her to do a small piece of work.
THE VELVET CAGE is Book Two of The Veiled Court — a five-book series of standalone marriages within a thousand-year vampire Court.
Dark contemporary paranormal romance. Heat: on-page possession, blood-play, kink. Slow build, patient prose, contract-driven intimacy. Standalone within series.
His granddaughter inherited her grandfather's bench, his eye, his hands — and walked, unknowing, into the palazzo where the letter still hangs opposite a vampire's bed.
Cosima Sereni has been carrying a secret for fourteen months.
A Vatican official is holding her brother. The price of his return is a single act of theft from a Court vampire whose library she has been quietly restoring for half a year. The night she's meant to take the ledger, she decides — at the third turn of the binding in her hands — that she will not. She does not, in deciding, know that the man across the corridor has been watching from a chair beside the fire.
Lucian Orsini has been waiting for her in some private corner of his own attention for twenty-two years.
He bought a framed letter at auction in February 2004 — a letter he himself had written, in 1992, to a Florentine binder whose work he could read across centuries. He hung it opposite his bed without knowing why. He knows now.
What follows is the architecture of a contract drawn in eighteenth-century ink. A brother brought home by a vampire's hand in a hall in Castellammare. A bond made by a mortal's own asking on the evening of the third night. And the question of what a binder of twenty-eight can decide, at the chair on the right of the fire, when the man who has been the architecture of her fear for fourteen months comes to the front door at one in the afternoon and asks her to do a small piece of work.
THE VELVET CAGE is Book Two of The Veiled Court — a five-book series of standalone marriages within a thousand-year vampire Court.
Dark contemporary paranormal romance. Heat: on-page possession, blood-play, kink. Slow build, patient prose, contract-driven intimacy. Standalone within series.
Used availability for Danielle E Voss's The Velvet Cage