Celeste Arden has one rule: never sign her name to a lie. It cost her career, her relationship, and almost everything she owns. Restoring a neglected nineteenth-century portrait at an isolated English coastal estate should be her chance to start over.

Then the painted woman's hand moves.

Lady Vivienne Ash has spent 159 years imprisoned inside her own portrait. Once a powerful witch with a scandalous reputation, she has been stripped of her freedom, her magic, and even the ability to feel. But every careful stroke of Celeste's restoration brings something back: a sensation, a memory, a piece of the woman someone tried to erase.

And Vivienne is determined to make her fascinating, infuriating conservator feel something too.

What begins as an impossible attraction becomes an intensely intimate relationship between two women who know the damage love can do. Celeste is learning to trust again. Vivienne is learning that desire freely given is worth more than anything magic can command.

But the painting holds terrible secrets. A previous conservator died trying to restore it. A mysterious collector wants to claim it. And Vivienne has been hiding a truth that could destroy the fragile trust growing between them.

With the tide cutting off their escape and a centuries-old binding tightening around them, Celeste must decide how far she will go to save the woman inside the canvas.

Because some masterpieces were never meant to be admired.

They were meant to be prisons.

An atmospheric, intensely sensual sapphic Gothic romance featuring witchcraft, haunted artwork, dangerous secrets, hard-won trust, and a love powerful enough to reclaim what was stolen.

Maeve Hollow

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