The Honey of Departed Things: A Dark Fantasy Romance Novel

Every grave in Vey wears a hive instead of a headstone.While the body rests below, the bees build comb above it - and into that comb they pour the memory of the moment the person died. When the comb is full, a licensed mourner comes, cuts a single cell, and tastes it. Whatever she feels on her tongue, she must hand back to the family in plain words: this is what they were holding at the very end.Mara Venn has done this work clean and alone for twelve years.She has also kept a secret since she was nineteen - one that would strip her license if the Guild ever learned it. The night her own mother died, she broke every rule of her trade and tasted the comb herself, before any licensed hand could touch it.What she found in her mouth wasn't her mother's last feeling at all.It was a stranger's.Fifteen years later, the Guild is closing in over unpaid dues, and a woman arrives at Mara's gate insisting one of her dormant hives has started running warm - the same day she lost her own daughter's face from memory entirely.Before Mara can make sense of either, Ilyan Sore, a royal auditor, seals her gate under suspicion of a crime she swears she didn't commit.He's the one man in the city she has every reason to hate.He's also the one man she can't stop remembering.As the two of them dig into what's really taking memories from people who are still very much alive, every thread loops back toward a gentle, beloved institution that has spent years handing out mercy that looks, on closer inspection, exactly like theft - and toward the stranger's memory Mara has carried, unexplained, since she was nineteen.To clear her name and finally answer the question that's followed her for half her life, she and Ilyan will have to trust each other exactly as much as history says they shouldn't.Some debts get paid. Some can only be forgiven. And the truest things, once tasted, can never fully be unknown.The Honey of Departed Things is a slow-burn gothic romantasy featuring a forbidden investigation, a morally complex villain-institution, a heroine with a decade-old secret, dual points of view, and a romance as dangerous as it is inevitable - for readers who want their romance dark, their mystery fair-played, and their happy ending earned.