Crowned to Die

Mina Ashcombe prepares the royal dead for their passage beyond the Veil. Its necessary work, unclean work, the kind that earns gloved hands and averted eyes wherever she goes. At Stillmourn Citadel, it earns her something else: a sealed chapel, a missing portrait, and a Crown Prince who has refused his own coronation for three years rather than accept the death sentence written into his bloodlines oldest bargain.

Lord Alistair Drennan doesnt ask questions. He gives commands, holds his grief at arms length, and has decided, long before Minas arrival, that he forfeited the right to be loved the moment he survived his brothers death. But Mina sees what this house has spent years teaching everyone else to look away from, and what she finds beneath Stillmourns careful silences is no ordinary curse. Its a conspiracy three generations deep, built on murder dressed in an ancient bargains familiar symptoms.

As war forces the coronation forward and a magistrates patience runs out, Mina must choose between the safety of distance and a truth that could cost them both everything. Some debts, she learns, were never meant to be paid in blood at all.

A standalone Dark Fantasy Romance with one slow-burn, earned HEA.