Burn

Sashara Jones is a forensic photographer. She walks through rooms where terrible things have happened, raises her camera, and feels nothing. She has spent eight years perfecting this - the clean, functional distance between herself and the world, between what she documents and what she allows herself to feel. It keeps her useful. It keeps her safe. She has stopped asking whether it is also keeping her dead.

Then a letter arrives from a woman she never knew existed - a dead aunt in Highland, California, leaving her the sole heir to an estate called The Eternal Rose. Sashara almost throws it away. She doesn't.

The house is four stories of Victorian stone in the San Bernardino foothills, and it is warm when it shouldn't be, lit from within when the power is off, and full of portraits of women with scorched frames and perfectly preserved faces. At midnight on her first night, every fireplace in the house ignites at once.

The fire doesn't burn her.

In the burning library she finds Damien - ancient, still, and impossibly certain she was coming. He has lived in The Eternal Rose as long as the house has stood, and he has been waiting for exactly the right woman: hollow enough to fill. He knows her name. He knows her line. He knows what the women in the portraits were - and what they chose, and what it cost them. And as the fire wakes up around them both, Sashara begins to feel the one thing she has been most afraid of:

Something.

Burn is a gothic romance about a woman who taught herself not to feel and the entity that teaches her it was never too late to begin again. It is dark and warm and intimate, set in a house that is less a building than a living argument, and it is the story of how a woman finds her way back to herself - not in spite of the fire, but through it.

Written by an author in the year she needed it most, and dedicated to everyone who has ever stood in the wreckage of their own numbness and wondered if the spark was still there.

It is. It's always still there.

For readers of Anne Rice, V.E. Schwab's The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, and gothic romance with literary ambitions and something true at its center.