Silas Crane was supposed to be the boy Asher Boone left behind. Instead, he became the thing Briar Hollow is afraid to let go.

Ten years after fleeing his isolated West Virginia hometown, investigative podcaster Asher Boone comes back chasing a string of disappearances no one wants to explain. He expects closed doors, rehearsed answers, and the same suffocating silence that followed his father's mysterious death.

He doesn't expect Silas.

Once Asher's best friend. His first love. The man he never managed to forget.

Now Silas is older, harder, and woven into the town's secrets so tightly that no one speaks his name without lowering their voice. Strange veins shadow his wrists. His eyes turn wrong when the woods draw near. And every warning he gives Asher sounds less like a threat than a plea.

Leave before the thaw.

But Asher has spent his adult life refusing to look away from buried truths, and Briar Hollow has buried too many.

His investigation leads to an ancient oak hidden beneath the town's religious traditions, a secretive council called the Vestry, and a ledger filled with the names of people who vanished without explanation. At the center of it all stands Silas—the reluctant Warden of something old, hungry, and rooted deep beneath the Hollow.

Then Asher discovers his own name has been added to the ledger.

The town wants obedience. The thing in the woods wants its due. And Silas has been ordered to prepare the one man he never stopped loving for a fate neither of them is willing to accept.

As old resentment gives way to dangerous attraction, Asher must decide whether Silas is part of the nightmare he came home to expose—or the only person who has been trying to keep him alive.

Because some towns protect their secrets.

Briar Hollow feeds them.

And if loving Silas means standing between an ancient god and the people who serve it, how much of himself will Asher risk before the Hollow decides to take the choice away?

THE HOLLOW KING

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