Prince of Mourning

by Jenn Bennett

Genres: YA Fairy Tales & Folklore; YA Historical Fiction

Synopsis

Belladonna by Adalyn Grace meets A Study in Drowning in this sizzling gothic romantasy that follows the forbidden romance between a young nurse and a mysterious young man imprisoned by a dangerous occultist.

After receiving a strange summons, eighteen-year-old nursing student Molly O’Rinn finds herself the private live-in nurse for a wealthy young man in his haunting Hudson Valley mansion. But after arriving at his secluded estate, Molly discovers that her handsome employer is not what he seems, and most surprising of all is what rests deep inside the mansion’s walls.

Perhaps not what, but who…

A young man about Molly’s age—at least in appearance—is a prisoner of the estate, locked behind magical barriers. Nin is royalty, the son of a legend. He is not human, not of this world…and not like anyone Molly has ever met.

Molly should stay away from him. But Nin is a terrifying yet strangely attractive being, and soon both Molly and Nin find themselves drawn to each other, sparked by a connection neither of them can deny. But as the two become entangled in a forbidden affair, outside forces start to press in.

Because Nin’s legendary father is looking for his son, and he’s not the only one.

To keep Molly safe, Nin must find a way back to his realm or suffer the consequences. Even if it means choosing his princely duty over love.

Release date: October 28, 2025

Publisher: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers

Print pages: 384

Sample

Chapter 1

CHAPTER 1 August 1873 — New York City
The hospital’s administration corridor was always deserted after midnight. I glanced over my shoulder to double-check that I was alone, then peered through the first-floor pharmacy’s iron bars. Apothecary bottles, powder tins, and medicinal jars sat in shadowed cubby holes, locked up tight and out of my reach. They looked even sweeter than the fondant jars down at the chocolate shop on Maiden Lane. Definitely more forbidden.

Bellevue Hospital allowed its male orderlies to carry keys to the pharmacy door. The male doctors as well. The male druggists. Even the male janitors.

But not us nurses, oh no. Too young, too female.

My breasts were probably getting in the way of my brain comprehending why.

I wasn’t allowed to know the chemical names of most of the hospital drugs, even though I’d been enrolled for three whole months in Bellevue’s new nursing training program. Half my job was spooning out mystery medicines that came from these very jars.

I’d teach myself what was in them if it was the last thing I did.

“Carum… carvi?” I read aloud from the painted words marking the nearest ceramic jar. A band of flowers circled the Latin script. “What do you think that could be?” I whispered to my companion. “Or the one next to it—chloral hydrate? Are they related? Hmm…”

The ginger-haired nursing student at my side briefly twirled near a ticking grandfather clock in the dark hallway, watching her cornflower-blue nursing skirts billow. “Molly O’Rinn, you are the most stubborn girl I’ve ever known.”

Was that an insult? I couldn’t tell. “Wish they’d taught us Latin back in school.”

Bethany stopped twirling and stifled a yawn. “If I knew Latin, my father sure wouldn’t have sent me here. Really don’t understand why you’re so obsessed.”

I gripped the handle of my nursing lantern and lifted it higher, squinting into the dark pharmacy. “I’ve told you a hundred times, I won’t stop until I can prove the doctor made a mistake when he gave you those two bottles.”

“What bottles?”

Poor Bethany. She really didn’t remember her own death.

Then again, most ghosts couldn’t. At least not the ones I could see. And in all my eighteen years, I’d never known anyone else who could see the dead like I could, something that had worried and frightened me as a child. But as I’d grown older, seeing random ghosts had just become part of my life. A secret that I kept close to my heart.

Most people didn’t even want to believe someone else could see something they couldn’t.

Hard to blame them, really.

With her pink cheeks, Junior Nurse Bethany Cross still looked as alive as any other mortal walking around this hospital. At least, she did to me. Until I studied her eyes. Or tried to find her shadow.

Poor Bethany had died early this summer, only a month into our training. She’d gotten sick during our rounds, and one of the doctors had given her what he still claimed to this day was run-of-the-mill cough medicine. Whatever it actually was, it killed her within an hour. My theory was that the doctor made a mistake and gave Bethany something intended for another patient. But neither he nor the hospital would admit to negligence, not when their shiny new nursing program was on the line. The hospital’s official report of Bethany’s unexpected demise used words like “tragic” and “accidental,” and because Bethany had been just a nobody from a poor family, her death was easily swept away.

And that just wasn’t right.

“Knowing what’s inside these jars and bottles doesn’t concern us. You’re too curious,” Bethany murmured, shaking her head as she gazed into the dark pharmacy. “Always the first to put your hand up in class and ask ‘why.’ Always questioning the doctors when they ask you to do something. It’s not rational!”

Rational? A bloody ghost was lecturing me about being rational? Bethany shouldn’t even have existed. “Look, I know you don’t remember what happened to you…”

She pouted. “Nothing happened to me. What are you talking about…?”

It was no use. We’d had this conversation a dozen times over the last few weeks. Most of the ghosts I encountered were merely caught in a loop of their daily lives, uninterested in talking about their deaths or much of anything else, really. I could see them, and I could speak to them. But if I tried to touch them, my hand would just pass through the air.

I sighed and tried a different tactic. “Think of it this way. Nurses can do more than just empty bedpans and take temperatures if they have the right information. I want to learn—I want to help people, yeah?” I whispered passionately. “Why is gaining knowledge so… forbidden?”

“Because they’re smarter than us. Ugh, will this shift ever end?” Bethany yawned again and said dazedly, “Can you dream while you’re awake? I think my brain has decided it’s had enough of being tired and has gone to sleep without me.”

Just looking at her, you’d think that she’d spent the entire night working her fingers to the bone. She pushed a messy ginger braid off her shoulder, then frowned at the nurse’s fob watch pinned upside down to the top of her bodice, allowing its wearer to see the dial while their hands were occupied. Well. A nurse’s watch used to be pinned to Bethany’s bodice, back when she was alive. In reality, that very watch was pinned to my own bodice at the moment; because Bethany had been my assigned partner for training, I’d been given some of her nursing tools when she’d died.

And unlike Bethany’s ghost, I was both spiritually and physically exhausted, but I was nearly at the finish line. In minutes, my shift would be over, and I could leave the hospital to sleep like… well, the dead. Had it really been twenty-four hours since I’d been to our living quarters?

Must stay awake, must concentrate…

I’d just finished the last of my predawn rounds, walking the wards, and this was my last chance tonight to study drug names while the hall was empty. So I ignored Bethany and carried on with my secret mission, face pressed against the iron bars of the pharmacy window.

“Balsam styrax benzoin, hmm…” I scribbled with the pencil attached to one of several chains dangling from a frilly silver chatelaine clipped to my apron’s waist. My chatelaine held other tools that clinked together against my skirts: a small pair of scissors, the miniature notebook I was using to take notes, a spoon for (unknown) medicines, and a case with safety pins to use with bandages. “Do you think this one’s for digestion…?”

Bethany sighed. “Don’t care. I’m only here because my father says my face is boring and I’m built like a starving rat, which makes me unmarriable.”

My mouth fell open. “Bollocks. Who in God’s name says that to their own daughter?” To be fair, none of us were classic beauties, as our nursing program required its initial six students to possess both intelligence and iron constitutions, yet to be “plain of face.” Male doctors feared pretty girls might pose a “distraction” to the male patients, and pretty girls, they said, would end up leaving work for marriage.

Self-conscious, I fidgeted with wisps of my dark brown hair that had fallen loose from its pins over the course of my shift. I vaguely wondered what Bethany thought of my face, which was rounder than hers but no less plain. The only thing vaguely remarkable about me was a pair of pale blue eyes I’d inherited from my mother.

I frowned at Bethany. “Listen. If my father had told me that, I’d—”

“Lily said your mother never married, so you didn’t have a real father.”

When did any of my other sister-nurses have time to gossip? But she wasn’t wrong. My father had been a morgue attendant who’d once worked in the basement of this very hospital. Never married my mother. He even refused to accept me as his own child until I was three. I only knew him in bits and pieces, a story here, a coin for sweets there… before he disappeared from the hospital and our lives when I was eight.

I saw him again, roaming the street near the mortuary entrance where he used to work, almost a year later. He was mumbling to himself and didn’t recognize me. But what stood out the most was something so subtle, anyone could miss it: his body didn’t cast a shadow, and his eyes didn’t reflect light. That little fleck of light in people’s eyes? It wasn’t there. Light couldn’t reflect because there was no body, only the illusion of one that was stuck, restless, and alone.

My father was the first ghost I ever saw.

Bethany was number thirty-one.

“And your father is an expert on marriage?” I challenged. “What, is he a matchmaker? Or maybe he’s a clairvoyant who can see the future, can he?” I waved my fingers dramatically and made spooky noises.

Bethany rolled her eyes. “He’s just been promoted at the factory and says I must earn. I can’t speak in front of a group of people without wanting to vomit, so being a teacher wasn’t possible. That left secretarial work, washing clothes, or… this. I had no idea it would be so hard.”

That’s where we differed, because I loved a challenge. Granted, I didn’t particularly like these marathon shifts. They were brutal. But I didn’t care. I’d wanted to be a nurse ever since I could remember.

Being here in this nursing program at Bellevue was the biggest opportunity of my lifetime. There had been hundreds of applicants, but only six girls in the entire city had been chosen. For a second-generation Irish immigrant like me, eighteen, and with both parents gone, being here was a dream come true.

“To be honest,” she continued, “I’d do just about anything to get out of this dumb nursing program and be married. I don’t think I care one way or another whether any of these patients live or die. Most of them are trash-picking muckers anyway. If they were fine-bred people, they wouldn’t be here—the doctors would make house calls for them. Why do we bother saving them?”

“I’m one of those muckers, you know,” I told my fellow sister-nurse. “If I got hurt or sick, this is where I’d come. To a public hospital!”

Bethany merely shrugged. “I’d rather be married and nursing babies than nursing the poor.”

Ridiculous. Our training program was the first of its kind in the States. It was based on Florence Nightingale’s revolutionary work in England. Miss Nightingale said a new generation of nurses should be trained. Organized. Knowledgeable and ready to care for patients.

They should be more than the male physicians’ personal servants.

They should be independent.

Unlike Bethany, marriage was the absolute last thing I wanted.

I glanced at my Irish mother’s gold claddagh ring: a crowned heart held by two hands. The only jewelry I owned and my most precious possession. It had once belonged to Mammy’s childhood friend back in Kilkenny, Ireland, who bequeathed it to her when Mammy came to America with my grandfather. I could almost hear Mammy’s lilting voice when I touched it. You’re a born nurse, Molly-o. Don’t let a boy steal your heart. He will take your freedom with it, he will.

Because of what my mother had endured, treated as an outcast for having me out of wedlock, I made a promise on her deathbed that I would pursue a career—never marriage. Never love.

No boy would take nursing from me. Bethany was a fool.

She shrugged. “Why do you need to know Latin medicine names?”

I wasn’t going to bring up her death to her again. What was the point? Instead I dramatized my answer with a mocking tone. “Here, Mrs. Johnson, take a spoonful of this unknown elixir, please and thank you. What is it, you ask? No clue. But, hey, if my doctor has made a mistake, it could even kill ya. Open wide!”

Bethany rolled her eyes again, which only frustrated me more.

When we first started the program, we were each given a lantern, our chatelaine tools, and a uniform—a cornflower-blue dress with a white apron. We were also required to recite a five-point pledge:

I solemnly pledge before my Sisters of the Lamp to:

1. 1. Dedicate myself to the welfare of souls committed to my care
2. 2. Not take or knowingly administer any harmful drug
3. 3. Keep in confidence all personal matters of every patient
4. 4. Live chastely
5. 5. Hold all life dearly

“Point two of our pledge says we’re not to knowingly administer any harmful drug,” I reminded Bethany. “Now, tell me, go on, how am I supposed to do that if I don’t know what I’m giving people?”

“The knowing is the problem! If you don’t know what medicine you’re giving, how can you be to blame? It’s not your responsibility. Just do what the physicians tell you. Wash out the bedpans and change dressing when it’s bloodied. Stop playing doctor, Molly.”

“I don’t want to be a doctor. I want to be a nurse—a good one! I need this information to do my job properly. Why should I be denied it because of my gender and age? The lack of this very knowledge killed you!”

“What in the world are you talking about?”

Ugh. It was frustrating. No other ghost had talked to me as much as Bethany did. Sometimes she disappeared on her own. Sometimes I could tell her to go away. She appeared randomly but would generally show up when I called for her. And she was the first ghost to follow me any distance. Usually they stayed in one place. I guess Bethany was the literal definition of a “restless spirit.”

The thing was, we hadn’t even been that close when she was alive. I was eager to learn, and she… wasn’t. Then again, most ghosts I encountered weren’t interested in anything but their own lost lives, and after I talked to them a few times, they disappeared. I’d never known a ghost to stick around longer than a few weeks.

Except for one.

One anomaly. One I didn’t understand.

It was someone I’d seen multiple times over the years. I wasn’t sure what kind of ghost he was, exactly. But he was different from the others.

The Black Groom.

That’s what I called him when he appeared to me as a child. A young pale-faced man, perhaps my age now, maybe even a couple years older, with a head full of loose, dark curls and a most serious expression.

He was always dressed in black from head to foot. A boutonniere was pinned to the lapel of his fine suit, one with a white lily and a red feather, as if he were attending a fancy wedding.

The first time I saw him, I was eight years old, and Mammy had taken me along to the funeral for her best friend—the one who’d given my mother the claddagh ring back in Kilkenny. Her friend had made the trip over to America on a steamer ship to live with relatives in New York, but had gotten sick on board and didn’t survive. They didn’t have the money to send her body back to Ireland, so she was buried here. After the graveside service, Mammy returned to the coffin to leave a rose. I’d never seen her fall apart like that, weeping uncontrollably, and it hurt my heart something fierce because I didn’t know how to help her, and that scared me.

That’s when I first saw him, the Black Groom.

He appeared out of nowhere, between blinks of my eyes. Call it instinct, but I instantly knew there was something different about him. Tingles ran down my spine, and I froze in fear. He stepped behind my mother and put a hand on her shoulder, but she didn’t look up—not when he touched her, and not when a frightened gasp escaped my lips. She just sighed deeply and choked back tears. But the Black Groom? Oh, he heard my gasp. And when his serious face turned toward mine, his eyes widened in confusion.

I had startled him. How or why, I didn’t know, but he promptly disappeared.

There one moment, gone the next.

I even saw him one time in our tenement apartment, when my mother was rereading my father’s obituary, clipped from the newspaper. The Black Groom appeared out of nowhere in the middle of the living room to put a hand on my mother’s shoulder, just as he’d done the first time, and she immediately stopped crying. Once again he was surprised when our gazes met, and he quickly disappeared, leaving me stunned.

And curious.

When my mother died, I half expected to see him, since he’d shown up when my mother was grieving. It was the only thought that distracted me from my own pain as I waited to see his cool expression, or perhaps feel his hand touch my shoulder. But no. He didn’t appear. And after that, I spent a lot of time thinking about him, what kind of ghost he could be. And why he only came to my mother when she was grieving. Was he her guardian angel? Now that she was gone, would I never see him again? It felt like an extra layer of loss, but I couldn’t explain why.

Just when I thought the Groom was a mystery I’d never solve, buried with my mother, he appeared again.

It was a year ago, on Canal Street, near a carriage that had turned over just after dusk. As a cool rain fell, and when I stopped to survey the gruesome scene, the Black Groom suddenly appeared behind a woman who was screaming for her dead husband. He put his hand on her shoulder, just as he had with Mammy, and the woman’s screams quieted. When he took his hand off her shoulder, he glanced in my direction, and it felt like the ground disappeared from under my feet.

Like I was suspended in time.

The chaotic accident scene around us seemed to suddenly go quiet as the Groom’s serious gaze locked on mine. But just when I expected him to disappear as he’d always done, I was surprised to hear him whispering to me in the night air.

“You… see me?” His words had a strange cadence, and there was a sharp wariness behind his eyes.

He was wary of me?

Shock gripped my chest. I tried to speak, but it got stuck in my throat, so I merely nodded in answer. And when I did, panic covered his grim face. Before I could ask him who he was, and why I kept seeing him like this, he did what he always did and vanished.

Disappeared between the falling raindrops, leaving me confused and a little frightened.

But that was a year ago, and I hadn’t seen him since. I had thought of him now and then, though. And wondered why he’d been so fearful of me.

A loud disturbance inside the hospital drew me out of my thoughts.

Back entrance.

Orderlies must have been bringing in a patient through the alley.

Thundering footfalls made Bethany and me scatter in a panic. As we scurried away from the barred pharmacy, my lantern swung a golden pattern around the hallway. An orderly named Lynch rounded a corner and spotted me. “Ho! Is that Nurse Molly? Where are all the docs, girl? Empty as a tomb in here! I need someone with Smithie’s new key to open the basement mortuary.”

Smithie was the graveyard-shift morgue attendant, but he was off tonight. “Check surgery,” I called back, a little breathless as I walked toward him. “Haywood’s finishing up Mr. Brown’s leg. Sayre’s resting after a double shift. One intern is out on house calls. But Doc Dalton hasn’t left yet. He should be free.”

“Unless he’s busy drinking scotch in his office,” Bethany mumbled under her breath.

She wasn’t wrong. Doc Dalton was a drunk and a tyrant… and he was the reason that no one but me could see Bethany anymore.

Orderly Lynch swore under his breath. “Nay, they’ve got Dalton stitching up a finger.”

“Is that the screamer?” I asked, hearing a male cry in a distant hospital hall.

The orderly nodded and spoke breathlessly. “Ambulance driver brought him in from an alley outside a hotel on Canal Street, some valet to a fancy fella and his sister—some very important people from upstate. They ran into a street gang after coming home from the opera. Valet took a razor to the hand, but he was lucky, actually. The gentleman’s sister was struck down. It’s her body we need to wheel into the mortuary.”

“Ar dheis Dé go raibh a hanam,” I mumbled in Irish. Rest in peace.

“Betcha it was the Bowery Boys gang,” Bethany mused. “My father says they are a plague on our city.”

Another distant cry within the hospital made me wince. Orderly Lynch beckoned. “You, come with me and help the doc keep this screamer quiet.”

Bethany groaned. “I just want to go to bed,” she said as her body began fading in front of me. A second more, and she was gone. Typical. She’d always made me do the work when she was alive, so why would it be any different now?

I hurried after the orderly, skirts swishing around my low-heel, button-up black boots. We wound through the administrative corridor, with the clink-clink of my chatelaine chains beating a rhythm against my skirts. Moonlight shone through tall windows as we cut through the maternity ward, where several pairs of white eyes peered back at us, patients woken by the screams. One of the new mothers asked what was going on. I patted patients’ feet over tightly tucked blankets as I hurried between rows of beds. “It’s all right, Mrs. Chambers, go back to sleep. We’re on our way right now to help the patient.”

Orderly Lynch led me to a row of examination rooms in a dark corridor outside the men’s ward. As we passed an open door, I spied our night ambulance driver talking to one of the hospital guards. “… something just feels off about the whole thing. Weren’t no gangs in sight when my carriage was rolling past their alley, and the gentleman was too calm for someone who’d just watched their family member die…”

Before I could think about that too much, Orderly Lynch directed me into an exam room that held the source of all the screaming. I stepped inside, a little wary.

The air stank of sweat and blood. A single oil lamp burned on a wooden table near a pedestal sink, illuminating a diagram of the human heart. In the center of the room, Doc Dalton stood over one of the smallest men I’d ever encountered in the hospital. He was somewhere between middle-aged and elderly, sporting a very thick, broomlike mustache that curled at the ends, and he sat on the edge of the exam table while a missing pinky finger on his left hand was being stitched. The front of his clothing was soaked crimson.

The rich man’s valet.

On the right side of the room, a policeman was questioning a young blond gentleman dressed in a fancy tailcoat with a muddy greatcoat atop it. The gentleman was very pale and thin, perhaps in his mid- to late twenties. And despite the disheveled state of his coat, his fine clothing oozed money and prestige.

The gentleman gripped an elaborately decorated silver hourglass. Curiously, it had no glass or sand, more resembling a cast-metal sculpture of an hourglass than the real thing. Whatever its purpose, it looked very old, possibly European, and it must’ve been important because the gentleman’s knuckles had turned white as he clutched it.

The gentleman was so tall, the policeman had to lift his head to speak up to him. They both glanced at me when I entered the exam room.

“… and I never got a proper look at their faces,” the gentleman was saying. “Sorry I can’t be of more help.” The way he shifted his feet, he looked as if he were bursting with energy, on the verge of rushing out of the room. I supposed grief affected everyone differently.

“Ah, here we are,” Doc Dalton said, glancing in my direction while holding a bloody curved suture and trailing thread. “Help has arrived, Mr. Hoffmann, just in time.”

“Lost the missing pinky, huh? You want me to stitch him up?” I asked the doctor. I was pretty good at that, and the only one of the nurses who knew how to do it.

“No, Junior Nurse Molly, I’ve got it. Do you happen to have a bottle of Mother’s Little Helper on you?”

Laudanum, he meant, milk of the poppy. One of the few medicine names I actually knew, due to the fact that we gave it out so often. I often wondered if it was what had killed Bethany.

However, nurses weren’t allowed to carry extra doses of anything, and he knew that. What was even more alarming was that the doctor was stitching this man up without numbing him or offering pain medication first. Was the doc that drunk already?

“Sorry, sir,” I said, glancing at the bloodied face of the valet, whose eyes met mine with fear and pain. “All the medicine I administered during my rounds tonight is already locked up fierce in the pharmacy.”

“Useless,” the doc muttered. Typical. He was always in a sour mood and took it out on us. He shouted a command to Orderly Lynch. “You, go fetch us a bottle from the pharmacy.”

“Sir, they’ve still got the girl sitting in the ambulance carriage. I need the mortuary opened,” Lynch countered, giving the gentleman a quick apologetic look.

But the gentleman was unbothered that people were discussing where to put his sister’s corpse. “She’ll keep,” he said in a low voice, the hint of a smile behind his eyes.

Wow. I couldn’t tell if he was joking inappropriately or trying to keep things light to avoid grief. Maybe he hadn’t been close with his sister? I really didn’t understand rich people. They seemed to operate on an entirely different level.

“Ask someone else. I don’t have mortuary keys on me,” the doctor snapped at Orderly Lynch. “Medicine, now!”

Lynch raced out of the room. I started to ask if I should go with him, but the tall gentleman began coughing violently.

And I do mean violently. The policeman moved away from him and shielded his face.

My gaze flicked over the gentleman’s sharp cheekbones, and eyes that were bloodshot and weary. As he coughed into his hand, I noticed rounded, raised nails on his fingers. Clubbing, it was called. Alarm bells went off inside my head. I peered more closely at the man’s face. He was unusually handsome; yet beneath his beauty, gravity seemed to be tugging on his skin, pulling all his features down. That was a look I knew all too well.

My mother had worn it during her final months on this Earth.

The gentleman had tuberculosis, a.k.a. the “white death,” most commonly known nowadays as consumption. It was a terrible condition that affected the lungs and other organs, a slow-moving, wasting disease that drained the very life out of people, until their lungs filled with so much fluid that they could no longer breathe.

Sometimes it took years and years for the disease to… “consume” a person.

And nobody knew what caused it, how to prevent it, or how to cure it.

My heart clenched. Don’t you dare think of Mammy during her final days…

I pushed away old grief and asked, “How long have you had consumption, Mr….”

“Mr. Voss,” the doctor said gruffly while the gentleman continued to cough.

The air stirred behind my back, and I sensed Bethany materializing. “Oh! I knew I recognized his face. That’s Charles Voss!” she whispered behind me. I tried to shoo her away discreetly, but as usual, she