Bride Of The Threshold
Arabella Saint-James, a cold, reclusive New Orleans heiress, inherits her late husband Elias’s decaying estate and a beautiful, unsettling slave boy named Jonah who's mute, otherworldly, and tethered to the land by forces Arabella can’t yet see.
As her suspicions mount, Arabella uncovers Elias’s dark obsession with voodoo and ritual possession. Jonah, it turns out, was never a boy but a vessel: crafted for a god Elias tried to summon. That god, Mal Lune, now lives inside Jonah dormant but awakening.
Arabella must confront the horrors of her past, including her betrayal of Colette, Elias’s mistress and the first failed vessel. As the house itself turns against her, Arabella is forced to decide whether to complete the ritual or destroy it with Jonah.
But her final act is neither. She rewrites the ritual at great cost,fracturing her own memory and choosing not death, but surrender. In saving Jonah, she loses the part of herself that belonged to Elias.
Now alone but reborn, Arabella remains at the estate as a guardian not of the past, but of the silence that follows it.
