A Room with a Door That Locks

London, 1882. Five radical printers have been bought out and shut down in four months. Isabel Pemberton means to find out who signed the bank drafts.

Isabel writes the pamphlets that make Members of Parliament squirm: starvation wages, cotton dust in girls' lungs, the vote for women. When someone starts buying up every press willing to print her, she walks into Beatrice Cresswell's literary salon looking for the patron behind it.

Instead she finds Alastair Verrine. In front of the whole room, he quotes back to her a pamphlet she never printed, word for word.

The factory girl who takes a lover is not seeking pleasure. She is seeking a room with a door that locks.

Alastair is Kindred. For two hundred and thirty years he has refused to take anything not freely offered. His family keeps ledgers in the cellar, and the names in them are the missing mill girls Isabel has been writing about.

So Isabel makes him an offer on her own terms: a contract in her hand, with a door she can open whenever she chooses. Octavia Verrine, the Matriarch, does not forgive broken rules, though. In London, one doctor's signature can lock a troublesome woman away for good. To reach her, Alastair would have to break the Old Compact and lose everything he has.

A Room with a Door That Locks is a slow-burn gaslamp vampire romance about power, consent, and a heroine who will only sign on terms she wrote herself.