The Chapter That Killed Him

After the Nora Bell case, Ciaran Venn wants distance from impossible manuscripts, public suspicion, and the unsettling fact that his own drafts keep finding buried crimes. He also wants distance from Jonah Vale, the careful, maddeningly perceptive man who stayed when no one else knew what to believe. Then a new chapter appears. It names a publishing editor who is still alive. The chapter says the man in the photograph will die on the eighth day after learning his name has been written. Julian Marks, a respected editor with a talent for discovering difficult books and burying dangerous ones, insists he does not believe in prophecy. But he has seen something like this before, and he is not nearly as calm as he wants Ciaran and Jonah Vale to think. When Julian dies exactly on schedule, the question is no longer whether the Draft is real. The question is who used it. Pulled into a world of agents, editors, private proofs, leaked pages, vanished writers, and literary favors no one wants recorded, Ciaran and Jonah must separate the genuine impossible fragment from the human forgery hidden inside it. Someone in publishing knows how to make a story disappear without burning a single page. Someone knows how to turn a prediction into an alibi. The closer the investigation pulls them, the harder it becomes to pretend their partnership is only professional. Jonah is the one man Ciaran trusts near the impossible pages, and the one man whose secrets could hurt him most. Every late-night file, every withheld truth, every too-careful touch turns the case into something more dangerous than evidence. As their slow-burn attraction sharpens under pressure, Jonah's family name keeps appearing near old records. Ciaran's mother may not have been adjacent to the Draft's origin. She may have been inside it. The Chapter That Killed Him is Book Two of The Drafts Series, an MM psychological mystery and supernatural suspense series about impossible manuscripts, buried crimes, slow-burn desire, and the stories that refuse to stay hidden.