The Mercy We Bury
Tavian Veyr owns a shipping empire, commands Bellacosta’s most feared crime family, and can buy almost anything except the feeling that he deserves to exist. Since witnessing his mother’s murder as a boy, he has lived by one conviction: everyone he loves becomes someone he fails.
Then Ilyra Vale walks into his abandoned conservatory and tells him his roof is falling apart.
A gifted art conservator with little patience for powerful men, Ilyra is hired to restore the last place Tavian remembers his mother alive. Their uneasy partnership becomes a refuge neither expected. Through arguments, quiet meals, and memories uncovered beneath damaged paint, Tavian begins imagining a life beyond the empire that raised him.
But Ilyra carries a truth that could destroy that future.
Her father killed his mother.
She has known for years. What began as fear becomes something uglier when she falls in love: a desperate willingness to postpone the confession that might cost her the only man who has ever truly seen her.
As an anonymous woman calling herself Moth sends fragments of the past, a stranger known as Peregrine begins dismantling the family’s protected history. Both have reasons to want the truth exposed. Neither intends to leave Tavian’s world intact.
When the secret finally breaks, love cannot erase complicity, and revenge cannot restore the dead.
With his empire turning against him and Ilyra forced to choose whom she will betray, Tavian must decide whether loving his enemy’s daughter is his greatest weakness or his first freedom.
Read
Chapter: The Things We KeepChapter Three: The Things We KeepTAVIANMy mother had written the dates beneath every photograph.Not just the month or the year. The day.14 June. Tavian refuses to swim.In the photograph, I stood at the edge of a pool wearing an expression I recognised. My father was waist-deep in the water, holding out his arms. My mother’s shadow fell across the paving behind me.I turned the page.22 June. He finally jumps.I had forgotten that I was ever afraid of water.The album rested across my knees. It was nearly midnight, and the sitting room lamps cast a yellow light over furniture nobody used. Across from me, a bowl of wooden fruit sat on the low table. My mother had bought it at a market because, she said, at least these wouldn’t be left to rot.Someone still dusted them.I turned another page.There were photographs of the conservatory before the vines reached the roof. My mother stood beside the unfinished mural, laughing at something outside the frame. She wore an old shirt with th
Last Updated: 2026-10-24
Chapter: Terms of EntryChapter Two: Terms of EntryILYRAFaced with him now, I understood how easily an attempt to make amends could become another kind of harm.“Is something wrong?” he asked again.I put my phone into my coat pocket. “A family matter.”His eyes stayed on my face. I resisted the urge to explain. Anything I added would have been for my own comfort, and I had already done enough of that today.“Do you need to leave?”The question caught me off guard.“I was just finishing.”“That wasn’t what I asked.”“No,” I said. “I don’t need to leave.”He stepped inside. Rain darkened the shoulders of his coat, and there was mud along the edge of one shoe. This morning, I had been too frightened to notice much beyond his expression. Now I saw the tiredness beneath his eyes and a small cut beside his thumbnail, almost healed.He looked towards the west wall.“Mrs. Dacre sent me a photograph.”“The initials?”He nodded.“I haven’t cleaned that area,” I said. “I only photographed it.”“Can you?”“Clean it?”
Last Updated: 2026-10-24
Chapter: What RemainsChapter One: What RemainsTAVIANThe morning I decided to tear down my mother’s conservatory, someone left fresh flowers inside it.White camellias. Six of them, arranged in a drinking glass on the table where she used to paint. The water was clear. Whoever had brought them had done so recently.I stood in the doorway with the demolition assessment folded in my hand.Behind me, rain tapped against the covered walkway. Somewhere above, a loose pane shifted in its frame. I hadn’t entered this room in nineteen years, but my body remembered it with an accuracy I resented: the narrow step at the entrance, the cold brass handle, the place where I needed to turn sideways because my mother always left a chair in the way.The chair was gone.For a moment, that bothered me more than the flowers.“Who’s been in here?”Severin stopped behind my shoulder. He had worked for my father before he worked for me, and still wore the same expression when something went wrong: mild disappointment, as thoug
Last Updated: 2026-10-24
LOGIN
