Jade_Rivera's Reading List
1 story
Where Roses Rot  by ShmollWitch
ShmollWitch
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In the rain-soaked city of Vespera, where Gothic cathedrals pierce the heavens and old aristocratic families cling desperately to a dying Victorian age, twenty-two-year-old Harmonia Vale spends her nights buried beneath the archives of Vespera University. Dusty records. Forgotten deaths.Ancient secrets. The dead have always fascinated her more than the living. But when Harmonia uncovers a hidden file connected to Blackthorne Manor and a series of mysterious deaths dating back centuries, she finds herself drawn toward a woman who should not exist. Mordaine Sangre is beautiful in the way storms are beautiful-mesmerizing, violent, impossible to look away from. Towering, pale as moonlight, with mismatched eyes and a voice that feels like velvet wrapped around a knife, Mordaine carries the scent of roses and rain wherever she goes. And according to every portrait, every record, every photograph Harmonia discovers... She has not aged in over three hundred years. As strange nightmares begin consuming her sleep and an unnatural obsession grows between them, Harmonia is pulled deeper into a hidden world beneath Vespera's elegant surface-a world of ancient hunger, drowned sirens, blood-soaked rituals, and monsters who wear devotion like a love language. Because Mordaine is not merely a vampire. She belongs to something far older. Something that sings beneath black water. Something that was never meant to love humans. But the closer Harmonia gets to uncovering the truth, the more dangerous their connection becomes. What begins as fascination slowly twists into dependency, desire, and a terrifying intimacy neither woman can escape. After all, some monsters do not kill because they hate. Some kill because they love too deeply. And in Vespera, where white roses rot beneath cathedral shadows and mourning bells ring for the damned, love and hunger have always been the same thing.