The Gilded Rat
By Silas Wrenwood
In Victorian London's labyrinthine sewers, a disgraced engineer and a lord of the underground must choose between the world above and the truth buried beneath it—and neither man will ever be clean again.
Elias Thorne has built his entire life on a single, desperate premise: if he can make the world clean enough, he can keep it safe. A meticulous junior engineer for the Metropolitan Board of Works, he surveys London's grand new sewers with steady hands and a spotless conscience—until fourteen men refuse to descend into the Fleet, a colleague's body vanishes in the dark, and a lord with a handkerchief pressed to his nose delivers an ultimatum that could end Elias's career with a single, quiet sentence.
The only guide willing to descend is Silas Kalloway. The toshers call him the Rat. He reads subterranean rivers like scripture, laughs at gas-lit authority, and names his price in something far more dangerous than coin: an unnamed favor, payable at his discretion. From their first handshake in a waterfront tavern—rough calluses against clean skin—Elias understands that Silas is everything his carefully ordered life was constructed to exclude.
Beneath the elegant facades of the Board of Works lies a charnel house. Bodies in sealed cisterns. Signet rings bearing official seals. A conspiracy reaching from flooded Roman chambers straight to Parliament. As floodwaters rise and assassins hunt them through unmapped passages, Elias's blueprints and Silas's instincts become their only weapons—and their proximity, desperate and irresistible, threatens to cost them everything they've survived.
Elias descended into the Fleet afraid of a splash. He surfaces knowing that the only contamination he cannot scrub away is the one he doesn't want to. But choosing Silas means surrendering every clean, respectable thing he's ever been—and the world above is still hunting them both.
A forced-proximity Victorian MM romance featuring buried conspiracies, enemies of propriety, and two men who find each other in the filth the city tries to hide.
