Poisoned Bloom

An extinct flower can paralyze a man with a single crushed petal—and it’s blooming in Liliana Vale’s greenhouse.

Behind the iron gates of Briarthorne Manor, Liliana lives by one rule: she tends what the world fears. Poison orchids. Belladonna. Blooms that bite back. The village calls her unnatural; the Empire calls her dangerous. So when a powerful lord dies from a rare poison traced straight to her estate, Commander Dorian Thorne arrives with an imperial summons and a promise: answers… or chains.

Dorian expects a culprit. He finds a house that breathes, vines that listen, and a garden that doesn’t take kindly to strangers. As suspicion tightens, Liliana discovers something worse than an accusation—someone has been inside her wards, harvesting extinct flora like keys. The theft isn’t meant to kill. It’s meant to open what’s buried beneath Noryth Hollow.

Forced into an uneasy alliance with the man trained to break witches, Liliana must follow a trail of sap-inked rituals and hidden passages before the Hollow wakes hungry. Because if the Empire doesn’t burn her first, her own garden might decide what she’s worth.