SHADOWS OF THE LAMP • BOOK 4

The Fae Masquerade

By Vesper Starforge

Two men on the run from a corrupt empire. One silver invitation that could save them—or consume them whole.

Edwin Blackthorn is a scholar drowning in secrets. Three months in a Lambeth safe house, surrounded by decades-old correspondence and the suffocating weight of evidence he cannot use, has sharpened his desperation to a blade's edge. He possesses proof that Arch-Magister Rowan—the most powerful man in Britain's magical Guild—committed crimes that shaped an empire. Without fresh evidence of Rowan's contemporary conspiracy, those thirty-year-old letters are nothing but ash waiting to happen.

Julian Thorne, Edwin's partner and protector, is a former Guild magister whose storm-fire magic was broken by the same forces hunting them. He wards their grimy windows and checks their perimeter with the obsessive precision of a man who knows exactly how quickly everything can be lost. When Edwin's cousin delivers a glamoured invitation to a masquerade hosted by the enigmatic Lord Ashworth—an invitation that blazes emerald against Edwin's skin and whispers of blood and belonging—Julian names it immediately: a lure. Edwin calls it something else entirely. Their only lead.

Ashworth Manor hides a conspiracy more monstrous than either man anticipated. Behind its impossible fairy-lit ballroom lies a systematic invasion—Fae Changelings replacing Britain's aristocracy, one hollow-eyed lord at a time—orchestrated through an alliance that reaches from London's drawing rooms to a dying queen's amber court. When Edwin is dragged through a hawthorn gate into a realm of eternal golden twilight and rotting glamour, Julian follows without hesitation, armed with cold iron, a spectral ancestor's oath, and a love too stubborn to obey the laws of physics.

What began as survival has become war. And Edwin is discovering that the man who swore to be his shield may need him just as desperately in return.

A forced-proximity historical MM romance featuring Fae conspiracy, enemies-to-lovers reluctant alliance, and gothic supernatural intrigue set in Victorian London.