A Southern Gothic dark zombie romance where love never dies...and when it does, it crawls out of the grave with a vengeance. Delaney Calder has spent her life among the dead. As the mortician of Hallowfen and heir to her family’s century-old funeral home, she knows how to keep secrets buried—especially the ones inside her own marriage. Her husband, Caleb, is as charming in public as he is cruel behind closed doors, and leaving him feels as impossible as raising the dead. Until the dead rise on their own. When Delaney’s first love—Haze Harlow, the golden-boy football star who died in a tragic accident—comes back into her life very much alive , everything she thought she knew rots at the roots. Haze isn’t the boy she buried. He’s colder. Wilder. Bound to Delaney by a curse older than memory and a vow he can’t break, not even by death. And when Haze discovers a dark, dangerous truth about his death…he swears an oath of bone-deep protection to Delaney. In this life. In the next. In every life they’re ever given. But Hallowfen is a town that feeds on secrets, and the dead aren’t the only ones who have claws. As Caleb’s grip tightens and ancient curses wake beneath the marsh, Delaney must decide who she becomes when the man she thought she lost—and the monster she fears she married—are both coming for her. In Hallowfen, the past doesn’t stay buried. And some debts are only paid in bone. The Bone Debt is a spicy, dark zombie romance set in a southern small town: part reanimated romance à la Warm Bodies and Lisa Frankenstein, part classic gothic resurrection in the vein of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, wrapped in the swampy Southern secrets of Where the Crawdads Sing. It reads as a standalone but is a part of a series and ends with a Happily Ever After. Perfect for readers who love: 🖤 Southern Gothic dark romance steeped in death lore, marsh-rot secrets, and ancestral curses 🔥 Obsessive, morally gray undead men who tear their way back from the grave to protect the woman they love ⚰️ Second-chance romance with the dead , where first love returns changed and bound to the heroine by fate and fury 🌩️ Small-town secrets , bridge-collapse conspiracies, and a heroine trying to escape the cage her family legacy built 🦴 Atmospheric Southern settings: from funeral parlors and embalming rooms to rain-soaked bridges and moonlit autumn festivals "Dark, aching, and wickedly alive, The Bone Debt showcases Cherri Meraschino’s signature alchemy—Southern Gothic horror braided with sharp-edged humor, emotional heat, and a cinematic strangeness that sets her work apart from anything else in dark romance today." Please note: full content warnings can be found on the author's website as some of the scenes and language may be disturbing to some.