Crowned to Die - A Dark Fantasy Romance #987931

Mina Ashcombe prepares the royal dead for their passage beyond the Veil. It's 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 bloodline's oldest bargain.

Lord Alistair Drennan doesn't ask questions. He gives commands, holds his grief at arm's length, and has decided, long before Mina's arrival, that he forfeited the right to be loved the moment he survived his brother's death. But Mina sees what this house has spent years teaching everyone else to look away from, and what she finds beneath Stillmourn's careful silences is no ordinary curse. It's a conspiracy three generations deep, built on murder dressed in an ancient bargain's familiar symptoms.

As war forces the coronation forward and a magistrate's 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.