Some debts aren't meant to be collected. Some are meant to be paid in blood.Liora Thornwood never wanted the cabin. She never wanted the overgrown meadow, the collapsed garden wall, or the unmarked grave rotting beneath November frost. But when her grandmother dies and leaves her Ashwood Hollow, she inherits all of it, including a warning sewn into the lining of an old coat: Never touch the roses.She should have listened.The bloom was impossible. Crimson, waxen, pushing through dead briars in soil that hadn't been tended in forty years. Liora reached out before she could stop herself. The thorn bit deep. Three drops of blood fell. And the forest went silent.That was when she felt it. A pulse beneath the frozen ground. A rhythm that wasn't her own heartbeat.His name is Malrik, and he has been buried beneath Ashwood Hollow for three hundred years. Not dead. Not alive. Bound by thorns and shadow and a curse that has waited centuries for a woman with Thornwood blood to bleed on the right grave. He speaks in a language her bones remember. He watches her with eyes the color of dying embers. And he tells her she is not a trespasser.She is the key.Trapped in a cabin with winter closing in and the townspeople refusing to meet her eyes, Liora begins digging into a family history her grandmother took to the grave. The roses on this mountain feed on something darker than water. The thing in the woods is not a ghost, not a man, and not nearly as patient as he first appeared. Every secret she unearths pulls her deeper into a bond she never consented to—a bond that feels less like salvation and more like a collar tightening around her throat.Malrik needs her to break the curse.But curses are not broken without sacrifice. And the more Liora learns about what he really is, the less certain she becomes about whether she is his liberator or his next offering.