In the gray, quiet city of Bellhaven, grief is a business—and Hattie Moss is the best at it.For eleven years, Hattie has been the steady hand in the chapel, the architect of the final hour, carefully shaping the mourning of others so they might survive it. And for those same eleven years, Constant has been standing at the edge of the room. He is a seven-foot-tall, mended man of fired clay and ancient history, a silent fixture at the back of four hundred funerals.Wh...

In the rainy city of Bellhaven, pastry chef Vivi Trân has spent nine years perfecting her craft, her life measured in flour, oven-baked scars, and a series of polite "yeses" that keep her moving from one job to the next. But when a mysterious matchmaker's card appears, Vivi finds herself at a gate she's passed a thousand times, stepping into a secret garden that defies the laws of nature, and into the life of Lucky, a Fae bound by ancient, restrictive magic.Forced into a thirty-day...

In a city where magic is bureaucracy, bail bond agent Teddy Baptiste plays by the rules, until her brother vanishes. Her only lead is Azriel Callow, a three-hundred-year-old "sealer" bound by ironclad, supernatural oaths.To find the truth, Teddy must enter a thirty-day contract with a being who treats every sentence as a binding agreement and has never once broken a promise. In a world of ink, wax, and ancient law, Teddy is about to discover that the most dangerous...

Pilot Ines Halloran knows the Bellhaven harbor better than anyone, but nothing prepares her for Ambrose—a living, breathing piece of the city's architecture bound by a strict sunset-to-sunrise schedule. In a rain-slicked world of bulkers, tide tables, and granite, a pilot and a gargoyle discover that sometimes the most enduring connections are carved in stone. A hauntingly atmospheric maritime romance where the tide turns on magic and the weight of the past is measured in centuries.

He's been standing in her reading room for two weeks. She never once read his name.Iris Nakamura catalogues the dead for a living, and she's good at it — good enough that the Bellhaven Athenaeum handed her the largest private bequest in its history and a hired minotaur to guard it.Asterion Malakos says roughly four words a week. He has no face she can read, no chair he can sit in, and no interest whatsoever in the archivist who talks at him for eight hours ...

Somebody has to tell the dragon his hoard is too heavy for the building.Ada Okoye is a structural engineer, eleven months divorced, and working through a numbered list of thirty things to do in the year after the decree. Number eleven was the matchmaker on Cobble Street.Three questions, one match, no refunds, and thirty days of good-faith courtship before either party may walk away.The card said Everett Kane — which is the name on the file ...

He can't hide a single thing he feels. She's never told the truth in her life.Marisol Ibarra has thirty days to survey the floor of Bellhaven harbor, and the Harbor Authority has assigned her the only diver in the city who doesn't need a tank.Nerio of Slackwater has eight arms, cool skin, and a body that changes color every time he feels something, which is constantly, and which he has spent thirty years failing to conceal. Everyone who has ever met him cou...

He has four days a year when he can't hide anything. She hasn't felt anything in three.Noor Haddad works nights in the emergency department at Bellhaven General, and she's good at it — good enough that nobody has noticed she stopped feeling things somewhere around year three. She kept working. That's the whole story.Her New Year's resolution was to do one thing that wasn't a shift. The matchmaker on Cobble Street took under an hour.Three questions, ...

He is cold-blooded, it is January, and her forge is the warmest room in the city.Vera Ostrowski shoes horses, insults everyone, and only went to the matchmaker on Cobble Street out of spite — because her ex-husband got remarried in October and had the nerve to look happy about it.Three questions, one match, no refunds, and thirty days of good-faith courtship before either party may walk away.The card said Sethis Amaren-Vosk. Fifteen feet of...

She takes buildings down. He's been standing in one for a hundred and forty years.Frankie Dunlop only went to the matchmaker on Cobble Street because she lost a bet. The rules were simple: three questions, one match, no refunds, and thirty days of good-faith courtship before you're allowed to walk away.The card said Ozrek of Clan Halvarr. Seven feet of orc, four generations of restaurant, and the best food in Bellhaven.It also said an addre...