The Mourning Heart

Professional mourner Inez Pike has spent six years grieving for strangers. When the wealthy Wren family offers her one hundred dollars to lament the death of Judge Thaddeus Wren, the money could finally purchase a proper grave marker for the husband and daughter she lost.

But the assignment comes with unsettling rules.

Inez must remain alone with the judge's body from sundown until sunrise. She must keep her veil lowered, leave every mirror covered, and never open the parlor doors—regardless of what she hears in the empty house.

As darkness settles over Wren House, the corpse begins to breathe. Voices whisper behind the mirrors, and something wearing the voice of Inez's dead daughter begs her to stop mourning.

Judge Wren does not want tears.

He wants absolution—and before dawn, he intends to make Inez pay for it with her soul.

The Mourning House is a chilling Southern Gothic novella about grief, injustice, and the restless dead who refuse to be forgotten. It is the first haunting tale in the M. L. Bullock Presents series.