This book contains violence, sexually explicit scenes, and adult language. Celtic Brooch Series — Book Twelve A Time-Travel Historical Romance of Grief, Second Chances, and the Courage to Choose Again Some wounds don’t fade with time. They wait—for the moment they are finally faced. Former Navy SEAL Tavis Stuart has survived war, built a life around protecting his young son, and found a place among people who understand the cost of silence. What he has never survived is the loss of his wife, who died giving birth. Grief has become a constant companion—unseen, unspoken, and relentless. When his estranged mother calls on Christmas night asking for help, Tavis refuses. He has learned the hard way that reopening the past rarely ends well. But when she tells him that her goddaughter—and Tavis’s childhood best friend— Aislinn Kennedy has vanished without explanation, walking away is no longer an option. Aislinn’s disappearance leads the clan to an impossible discovery: a bloodstone brooch hidden inside an ancient artifact, and security footage that shows her surrounded by fog before she vanishes from a museum in Rome. The trail does not lead forward. It leads back. Aislinn awakens in New York City in 1896—a city alive with ambition, corruption, and reform at war with itself. As she struggles to survive in a century that does not welcome women with knowledge or independence, she is drawn into the orbit of Police Commissioner Theodore Roosevelt , a man determined to impose order on a city that resists it at every turn. Danger is constant here. Violence is personal. And trust must be earned inch by inch. When Tavis finally reaches her, the reunion is anything but simple. Old feelings resurface alongside old wounds neither of them ever healed. Desire collides with grief. Hope competes with fear. And the second chance they never expected forces both of them to confront a truth they have avoided for years: survival is not the same as living. The past offers no mercy. The future offers no guarantees. And love, once lost, cannot be reclaimed without risk. As an ancient enemy closes in and the search for safety grows more desperate, Tavis and Aislinn must decide whether grief will continue to define them—or whether they are brave enough to choose again, knowing the cost. The Bloodstone Brooch is a dark, emotionally charged time-travel romance set in the heart of a changing city, where second chances are earned, grief demands courage, and love becomes an act of defiance against everything time has already taken.