A Victorian Gothic Paranormal Romance Novella by Briar Somerset In a town where health is currency and longing is lure, a reluctant investigator and seamstress must uncover whether hunger will anchor a man already slipping into the dark. Behind the decrepit doors of an Infirmary said to offer miraculous cures to London's ailing elite, people are vanishing. Private Investigator and estranged heir to French aristocracy Jacques Valmont is summoned across the channel to sleuth, despite the lingering sickness of his own—one of grief that stirs in his blood and shadows his mind. Amidst the fog and fever, he finds an unlikely ally in Annie, the quick-witted seamstress working next door to Beecham's Infirmary, whose presence seems to quiet the storm inside him. When she suggests the only way to breach the infirmary's guarded walls is becoming a patient himself, Annie's grandmother warns them both of curses that fester with longing. Unnatural aches that transform a person entirely, if not quelled. As Jacques nears the truth, desire and dread twist together. Annie may be the last tether holding him to his humanity—or the final thread that unravels it.

After a storm-ravaged voyage aboard The Hesper and a sleepless train ride into Paris, Jacques brings Annie and her grandmother to safety. He's determined to prove his intentions are decent—even as the hunger coiled beneath his skin threatens to make a liar of him. For No 29 rue des Saints-Pères hides nothing: not the past his father fought to bury, nor the grandeur of the opulent hôtel particulier he's inherited, nor the secrets he fears Annie will soon unearth. Annie yearns to trust him—to peek into his study of tome and obscura from the confines of the master suite in which she's barricaded herself—but men with wealth scarcely tell the truth, and Jacques, for all his gentle devotion, is still a man shadowed by something much older and more harrowing than grief. As he attempts atonement in the form of bouquets, garnets, and a most decadent veal stew, the aging Théâtre du Brouillard across the street quietly stirs to life, drawing scholars and artists alike into its lamplit corridors. When Amah’s curiosity leads Jacques across the threshold, they uncover more than chanson in the dark cabaret: proof he's not the only one harboring secrets, and that London’s nightmares will continue to haunt him until he faces what he's become. Yet, salvation soon arrives in the form of a summons to the Comtesse’s autumn ball at the Château Valmont, opening the social season. Expecting him to finally choose a proper noble bride, Jacques’s grandmother does not anticipate his arrival with a glowing seamstress on his arm. And so, beneath gilded portraits and the quivering quill of a notary who seems to record more than mere inheritance, Jacques is faced with the legacy he’s spent years artfully sidestepping. Annie, on the other hand, will learn that power can be stitched as deftly as a hem, wielded like a name reclaimed from the teeth of propriety, and that neither mad physician nor his tireless orderlies can halt the inevitable bloom of a countryside romance… Especially one as dark as the hearts entwined within it.