Velvet Rot Some sons are raised. Others are haunted. Kael Ashworth breaks people before they can break him — sharp-tongued, fearless in who he loves, ruthless in what he says. But there's one wound he's never let close: his mother, Elaine, and the childhood she abandoned. When a letter arrives in her handwriting, summoning him back to his dead father's house, Kael tells himself he won't go. He goes anyway. Inside, he finds a house that shouldn't be maintained, a photograph of himself he doesn't remember taking, and a warning: stay out of the garden after dark. His mother swears she didn't write the letter. Someone else did — someone who knows Kael's name, and has been waiting years to say it.