The Whisperwood Inheritance
By Miles Ashbourne
He came to sell a dead woman's house. He found a living man who refused to leave—and a grave that had been waiting fifty years to be opened.
Micah Thorne arrives at Whisperwood Estate with a deed, a return ticket, and absolutely no intention of staying. The crumbling Victorian manor his estranged grandmother left him is a liability dressed as an inheritance—rotting floorboards, disconnected electricity, and decades of accumulated silence. Two nights, he tells himself. Sign the paperwork. Sell the corpse of a house. Leave Vermont and its watchful woods behind. He has spent his whole life perfecting the art of not looking back.
The house is not empty.
Seth has been living in the servant's quarters for three years, maintaining the property with the grim devotion of a man atoning for something. He is all controlled silences and unsettling competence—and he refuses to leave. What begins as hostile occupation hardens into forced proximity as the storm rolls in, the roads wash out, and the walls of Whisperwood close around them both. The friction between them runs hot and complicated, and every shared danger strips another layer of careful distance away.
Beneath the estate's rotting bones lies something far worse than neglect. A hidden ledger. A journalist murdered in 1995. A mass grave in the ravine behind the house, fed for fifty years by a corrupt town council with organized crime money flowing through its veins. Now Micah and Seth are trapped—cars destroyed, phones dead, a sniper in the trees—holding evidence that could bring down everyone, with nowhere left to run.
Survival forces honesty. Shared danger dismantles every wall Seth has built around his guilt-hollowed interior, and every moment of crisis reveals how desperately Micah wants a home he has never allowed himself to want. But trusting someone completely might be the most dangerous thing either man has ever done.
A gothic MM thriller featuring enemies-to-allies romance, forced proximity, buried secrets, and dark family legacies.
