SHADOWS OF THE LAMP • BOOK 1

Spectres of Evershade Manor

By Vesper Starforge

What happens when the only man who can save you from the darkness is someone you were never supposed to trust—and the house itself is trying to kill you both?

Edwin Blackthorn arrives at Evershade Manor with ink-stained fingers, a scholar's pride, and a death sentence dressed in legal language. Seven thousand pounds in back taxes. December first. Debtors' prison or ruin—those are his only choices unless he can salvage something from the crumbling gothic estate his father left behind. But the manor holds more than debt. The clocks have stopped. Something walks the corridors at three in the morning. And Edwin's rational worldview is about to shatter like glass under an impossible weight.

Into gas-lit Whitechapel Edwin ventures, following desperate whispers to the night market's shadowed edges—where he finds Julian Winter selling bottled lies from a cramped stall and radiating danger like a second skin. Julian is an exiled war-mage, hunted by the Guild that destroyed him, surviving on bitterness and borrowed time. He doesn't take cases like Edwin's. He absolutely takes Edwin's money. Forced behind the same haunted walls, two men who should never have met begin circling each other with equal parts suspicion and hunger.

What they uncover inside Evershade Manor is worse than either feared: a century-old binding ritual, a murdered child's soul anchored to the stones, and a shadowy death cult that has been pruning the Blackthorn bloodline for generations—with Edwin as the final harvest. Every supernatural attack escalates. Every secret unearthed draws them closer to a truth that could destroy them both. The manor uses everything against them: ivy, chandeliers, piano wire, and the devastating revelation of Edwin's own impossible heritage.

But the greatest danger isn't the revenant screaming through the walls. It's the moment Julian offers Edwin something more terrifying than any ghost—his trust, his life, and a sigil inked in his own blood that says you matter more than my survival.

A slow-burn MM Gothic romance featuring forced proximity, found partnership, and a haunted house that bites back.