The Mourning Locket
Description
Book I of The Inheritance Bureau
Every heir has a secret. Every antique remembers its last owner.
Rain turns Richmond into a watercolor of ghosts when Dr. Cassian Vale steps inside a locked townhouse belonging to the U.S. Archives. His team-part scientists, part mediums-has been sent to contain a 19th-century mourning locket recovered from a Civil War field hospital. Inside its cracked glass rests not just a photograph... but a pulse.
The Bureau calls it emotional acoustics-the theory that strong human emotion can leave a measurable frequency in objects. The public calls it superstition. Cassian calls it his job.
But when the locket begins whispering in the voice of a long-dead woman, the investigation unearths more than echoes of grief. The object resonates with living memory-connecting murders across centuries, and unraveling secrets hidden in the Bureau itself.
As Cassian and his team-genealogist Arden Locke, empath Rowan Vale, analyst Ezra Monroe, and hacker Piper Wren-race to trace the artifact's lineage, they discover that every resonance they uncover draws something closer. Something that feeds on emotion. Something that remembers them back.
What begins as a recovery mission becomes a haunting inquiry into how far guilt travels through bloodlines-and what happens when the past refuses burial.
