The Hollow Will Have Us

Millbrook has survived for three hundred years because someone always pays.Ryan Mitchell arrives in an isolated Yorkshire village for an eight-week placement that is supposed to save his scholarship and close a conduct case. He expects hard work, silence, and an eventual road home.He does not expect the orchard to recognise him.Beneath Millbrook lies an old power that can lend strength, sight, persuasion, and more. But nothing it gives is free. Every use takes a tithe: a smell, a voice, a memory. Sometimes something far worse.When Ryan becomes bound to Ethan Blackwood, the wealthy heir whose cruelty helped send him there, hatred becomes intimacy and intimacy becomes something neither of them can safely name. Together they are stronger than either should be. They are also becoming increasingly difficult to separate.As the village's kindness reveals the machinery beneath it, Ryan discovers that Millbrook has survived for centuries by turning sacrifice into civic duty.This year, two blank stones are waiting in the orchard.And Ryan already knows whose names belong on them.The Hollow Will Have Us is an adult M/M folk-horror romantasy blending queer romance, dark academia, gothic atmosphere, supernatural power, morally complicated desire, and the question of how much of ourselves we can surrender before choice stops meaning anything.