Seat of Bone: Book 1 of The Hollow Series

He has watched her save nine lives. Tonight, he needs her to save the tenth.

Surgery is not about cutting. Surgery is about deciding.

Dr. Elara Fontaine is the best trauma surgeon in Louisiana, and the only person alive who knows what she did the night Gerald Picou bled out on her table. She didn’t freeze. She decided. And she walked out of the OR cleaner than she walked in.

She has built a life with borders. Work. Sleep. The plant on the windowsill. No surprises. No ghosts. No men.

Then a body arrives at her ER with a bullet in his abdomen and a brand burned into his chest that she is not supposed to see.

Judas Marchand is the executioner of The Hollow, the underground organization that owns the bayou the way the bayou owns the dead. He calls himself the Gardener. He resolves problems other men cannot. And he has spent nearly a decade pulling Elara Fontaine’s name out of every database, every surveillance feed, every pipeline that touches her, because the Fontaine line owes The Hollow a debt older than she is.

He was supposed to collect it. He was supposed to deliver her to the Table.

He was not supposed to fall in love with the way her hands move inside a human body.

When Elara saves the wrong man’s life, she crosses a threshold she did not know existed and triggers a Debt that has been waiting for her since before she was born. There are no trials. There is no finish line. There is only Judas, and the slow, deliberate erosion of every border she ever built.

And the worst part — the part that wakes her at three in the morning, scrubbing her hands raw at the sink — is not that he is hunting her.

It is that some part of her, the part she buried under the oath and the gloves and the careful architecture of her solitude, has been waiting for him.

BLOOD ROOT is the first novel in THE HOLLOW, a five-book Southern Gothic dark romance series following one couple from the bayous of Louisiana into the rotted heart of an organization that does not forgive, does not forget, and does not let go.

Reader advisory: Blood Root contains explicit content, graphic violence, on-page references to past sexual abuse, a morally black hero, an obsessed-but-restrained love interest, and a heroine whose darkness is foundational rather than reactive. Recommended for readers 18+ who loved Shantel Tessier’s Lords series and Leigh Rivers’ Edge of Darkness.