Comfort Me with Poison: A Gothic Dark Fantasy (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798185328163)

They call it Solace, and they pour it with a smile.

In the gilded kingdom of Verdantia, grief has a cure. It is served warm, sweetened to taste, and poured by loving hands.

No one asks what the tea takes away with the sorrow.

No one but Gwendolyn Aldermoor.

Gwendolyn possesses the finest palate in the capital, along with a secret that could destroy her comfortable life. For eight years, she has quietly steeped away pieces of her own will, dulling every inconvenient desire until she could endure a respectable marriage and the beautiful cage built around it.

Then she tastes the court's celebrated new comfort blend.

Beneath its honeyed warmth lies the unmistakable flavor of her own surrender. The tea is not merely soothing grief. It is removing something smaller, quieter, and far more essential: the power to say no.

Someone is pacifying Verdantia one cup at a time. Gwendolyn may be the only person alive who can taste it happening.

Her search leads from perfumed drawing rooms into the capital's poorest quarter, where she finds an unlikely ally: a dock merchant who would sooner hang than pour a cup without naming what it contains. His brutal honesty offers her something her marriage never has. It also awakens a love that demands nothing from her except the truth.

But the hand behind Solace is closer to Gwendolyn's table than she ever imagined. To break its hold over the kingdom, she must master the same power she means to destroy, endanger the one honest man she has left, and decide whether freedom is worth everything comfort has protected her from.

Some cups cannot be unpoured.

And the most dangerous woman in the kingdom is the one who can still refuse.

A standalone adult dark fantasy about consent, coercion, forbidden desire, and the terrible comfort of no longer having to choose. A gothic marriage thriller dressed in cozy fantasy. A romantasy with teeth.

Perfect for readers of Mexican Gothic and A Court of Thorns and Roses who came for the poisoned house, the impossible marriage and the woman who notices first.

Standalone. No explicit content, no profanity. About 124,000 words.