The Last Door of Briar House: A Southern Gothic Ancestral Fantasy Romance

The garden is blooming. The kettle is on. And the thing beneath the house has started calling her by a name that is three hundred years old.

Ava Briar spent a year believing her family was the whole story. Nine houses made the same bargain in the same decade. A woman walked down, a thing was bound, a family kept the accounts.

Eight of those doors are already open. Briar's is the last one holding.

What came up out of the first cellar in 1798 has no face of its own and has not needed one in two hundred years. It does not want Briar House destroyed. It wants the door opened properly, from the inside, by a Briar, because a door forced from outside stays a door, and a door opened by its keeper becomes a road. It has spent a century assembling the only two things that can do that.

One of them is Ava. The other is the true name Kaius has offered her a dozen times, and she has refused every time, because the moment it is spoken aloud the seam opens.

He is mortal now. He gave that up for her. He can die in this house like anybody else.

Somewhere below her, in the dark her grandmother told her never to open, something has been waiting three hundred years to be let out, and it is not what her family buried.

The Midnight Society, Book Two.