The Restoration

By Caleb North

Some secrets were buried to stay buried. He came to restore a painting—and unearthed a murder.

Ethan Clarke restores broken things for a living, driven by a quiet belief that damaged beauty deserves to survive. When a reclusive aristocratic family summons him to their crumbling Gothic estate to work on a private collection, the money is too good to refuse and the terms seem simple enough: clean, conserve, and ask nothing. But from the moment Ashford Manor swallows him whole—its portraits watching, its corridors whispering—Ethan senses that something beneath the polish is deeply, dangerously wrong.

Then he meets Julian Ashford. Sharp-tongued, scar-jawed, and vibrating with barely-contained fury, Julian is the prodigal heir who fled this house eight years ago and returned carrying wounds he refuses to name. When Ethan's scalpel reveals a hidden figure scraped from a family portrait—a dead man, a secret ring, a symbol that should not exist—Julian doesn't warn him away. He leans in closer. And neither man can pretend what passes between them is purely professional.

The painting is only the beginning. A fifty-year-old murder. A shadow council of corrupt officials, bought judges, and inherited silence. A hired operative watching their every move. The deeper Ethan and Julian dig—through sealed wings, flooded archives, and a confession written by a killer—the more the Circle tightens around them, threatening not just exposure but survival. Everything they've uncovered could destroy powerful people. Powerful people have always known how to make problems disappear.

Julian surrendered his freedom once to save Ethan's life. Ethan escaped a locked cellar to stop him from doing it again. Between them, something fragile and ferocious has taken root in the ruins of a dynasty—but love forged under duress must eventually face the terrifying ordinary. Whether it survives is the question neither man dares ask aloud.

A forced-proximity Gothic MM romance with murder, corruption, and an enemies-to-allies slow burn set against the crumbling grandeur of a cursed English estate.