The Palazzo That Drowns At Dawn - Sam

The palazzo drinks the flood so Venice does not have to. Her job is to catalogue what it swallows.

Flood-archive restorer Sofia, thirty-four, comes to Palazzo Vendramin on the Rio dei Mendicanti to catalogue a drowned family archive before a hotel fund buys the palazzo. On her first morning, the ground floor floods upward - inside the house, from inside the walls, against the tide. The palazzo, the boatman tells her, is drinking. It has drunk every flood since 1630, because below the waterline the unrecorded drowned of plague and acqua alta are still waiting to be named, and a choir that is not fed its names will eventually come up looking for them.

The palazzo’s Patron reads the dead to rest, name by name, at the water-door. Alvise Foscari was the plague doctor of Cannaregio in 1630. Four centuries on he is the house’s tide-gate and its cork - and he cannot cross its threshold unless the Keyholder finds his full name in the record and speaks it with intent. Sofia’s grandmother was Keyholder. She walked into the water on the last night of Carnival, and the choir has been holding something of hers ever since.

A polished acquisitions fund wants the palazzo, and the plague doctor’s heart sealed in its drowned chapel. The renewal of the Bargain falls due at the spring tide. And what the lagoon gives back at dawn is never, ever a gift.

Plague-doctor vampire hero. Forced proximity in a flooding palazzo. He falls first - he has had four hundred years of practice at waiting. A heroine who collates every record, and chooses with her eyes open.

The Palazzo That Drowns At Dawn is a spicy gothic vampire horror romance for adults: open-door, fully consensual, with a guaranteed happily-ever-after and a lagoon that keeps its own ledger. Book Two of Blood & Vines, after Bound to the Vampire of Villa Gente. Each book is a standalone love story threaded through one old Italian Bargain.