Immortal life as an Ancient is predictable at best.

For a Gardener like Zara? It’s downright mind numbing.

Plant the seeds. Help them grow. Harvest the blooms… and force-feed them to the souls whose blood had born them so they could face their own judgement, whether they liked it or not.

Tedium ad nauseam.

That is, until Etienne—the broody Collector who’d been assigned to her the year prior—shows up on her doorstep for the second time in one day to deliver a blackened scroll bearing Death’s seal.

With a brush of their fingers, Zara’s boring life is turned completely upside down, and it isn’t long before she starts to realize that everything is not what it seems in the great Below. And at the center of it all? Him.

Because as it turns out, Etienne has already given Zara his heart.

She just has to remember where she put it.

K.R. Fryatt's These Bloody Blooms is part of Goblin Presents: A Valentine's Anthology, a mashup of five short and sweet Valentine's Day novellas—with a side of yearning and angst. Written to fit every romantic appetite, and designed to be eaten like your favorite box of chocolates.