The god in the Bramblewood has killed more people than the village has graves. He has also been waiting three hundred years for the one woman who was never afraid of the dark.
Vivienne is a healer with steady hands and a folded-small life, and when the only person who ever loved her is dying, she does the one thing the stories warn against: she walks into the Bramblewood and offers herself to the god who lives there.
He accepts. Then he gives her rules. Do not call me by name. Do not seek me after dark. Do not touch—at all. And an open door she is free to walk out of whenever she likes, which is the first kindness anyone has shown her in thirty years and the most frightening, because a cage she could survive. A choice she has no idea what to do with.
The god is patient. The god remembers things she does not—a clearing, a stolen name, a child who once walked into his dark unafraid. The god will watch, and wait, and want, and never once take.
But there is a cold coming down out of the north that knew Vivienne before she was a healer, before she was small, before her own memory was taken from her one careful piece at a time. It is looking for her. It has her mother's voice. And the only thing standing between Vivienne and the thing that made her is a monster who has sworn he will die before he becomes one more hand that decides her fate for her.
Patience is hunger that learned to sit still.
Of Bramble and Bone is book 1 of a five-book dark romantasy series.
It is a slow-burn gothic romantasy about consent, captivity, and the difference between being kept and being chosen—for readers who want their monsters tender and their heroines unfolding.
Dark romantasy: slow burn, high tension, closed door, no explicit content. The central couple choose each other in this book. Book 1 ends with them apart, and their story continues through a cliffhanger into book 2.
Tropes: bargain with a god, forbidden touch, slow burn, a dangerous love interest who stays dangerous, and a healer heroine reclaiming her own will.
