Halloween Séance

By Silas Wrenwood

A skeptical journalist arrives at a fog-drenched Gothic manor to expose a beautiful medium as a fraud. He never anticipated that the ghost might be real—or that the man channeling it would see straight through him.

James Hartley has built his career dismantling hope. Séance by séance, he strips away comfortable illusions, exposing the grieving and desperate to cold journalistic daylight. He's good at it precisely because he feels nothing—or tells himself he doesn't. Hired to infiltrate a crumbling aristocratic household and destroy the medium Lady Catherine Thornwood has staked her sanity on, James arrives at fog-swallowed Thornwood Manor armed with notebooks, skepticism, and a loneliness he's spent eight years refusing to name.

Thomas Grey is everything a fraud should be: ethereally beautiful, strategically mysterious, infuriatingly composed. But within hours of James's arrival, Thomas commits the unforgivable act of seeing him—naming his isolation, his fear, his carefully constructed defenses—with an accuracy no cold-reader should possess. Their collision in a gas-lit library at midnight becomes the first crack in years of professional armor, and James cannot decide whether Thomas is the most dangerous man he's ever encountered or simply the most honest.

Beneath the séances lies something far darker: a young heir dead under suspicious circumstances, suppressed evidence, and a household thick with guilt and deliberate silence. As James and Thomas investigate together, the truth threatens to destroy everyone it touches—including the men pursuing it. Exposure means ruin. Discovery means prosecution. And the closer they get to Edmund Thornwood's buried secrets, the closer they edge toward each other's.

James came to Thornwood Manor to prove that mystery is always explicable. Instead, he finds a man who makes certainty feel like cowardice. Two people who've survived by hiding must now choose between the safety of silence and the terrifying possibility of being truly known—before the truth they've unearthed destroys them both.

A slow-burn enemies-to-lovers Gothic MM romance featuring spiritualist séances, a murder buried in shame, and two lonely men learning that some truths can only be spoken in darkness.