Borrowed Haunting

Zara Washington does not believe in ghosts.

She believes in data, strategy, and the particular satisfaction of walking into a broken thing and making it work. She believes in the life she rebuilt after her marriage ended - the independence, the career, the hard-won peace of belonging entirely to herself.

She does not believe in dead men.

Tariq Al-Amin was not a good man when he was alive.

He ran Sable Creek, Mississippi from the shadows for over a decade - seventeen shell companies, a hotel, a bank, four lumber mills, an entire town's economy built on money that bore a name nobody was allowed to say. He was a crime boss, patient, invisible and ruthless, and the men he made wealthy were afraid of him the moment they understood what he actually was. Afraid enough to shoot him three times at his own negotiation table. Afraid enough to write cardiac failure on the death record and pretend he never existed.

He has been in the house on Wisteria Street ever since. He is not less dangerous dead. He is more patient.

Zara figured out his history in three days. The shell companies. The ledger. The empire. She is sharp enough to see exactly what kind of man he was - controlled, calculating, dangerous. The kind who built power in the dark and never once needed anyone to know his name.

She did not figure out what he was doing to her until the boundary between his world and hers had already closed.

He never told her the truth. Not the full picture. Not once. He gave her pieces - shaped, selected, placed with the precision of a man who had spent a hundred and thirteen years alone with nothing but time and the cold intelligence of someone who had always operated from the shadows. He gave her exactly enough to trust him and withheld exactly enough to make sure she never saw what was happening until it was finished.

The pocket watch was always warm. She kept picking it up anyway.

Borrowed Haunting is a dark paranormal romance novella featuring a dangerous, manipulative ghost love interest, explicit content, and no happy ending. He was a crime boss in life. Death did not make him safer.

The house on Wisteria Street is no longer available to rent. The investigation has been closed.