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The Breath Between Us: A Dark Sapphic Romance featuring Jiangshi
Paperback
RomanceGeneral GLBTQIA Fiction
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Jul 25 2026
Pages: 260
Weight: 0.70
Height: 0.65 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Mei Zhang never wanted to come home.
After ten years away, the only thing that could drag her back to the dying Pacific Northwest Chinatown of Crescent Hollow is her grandmother's death-and the family funeral home she has spent her entire adult life trying to escape. She intends to settle the estate, pack what little she needs, and leave for good.
Then she finds the ledgers.
For two hundred years, the women of the Zhang family have served as keepers of a covenant older than the town itself. They stand between the living and the unfinished dead: the jiangshi, the stiff corpses bound by a grief-stricken Taoist priest in 1800 and never released. Most are mindless. Hungry. Dangerous.
Lin Yue is not most.
She is lucid. Lonely. A scholar who once traveled alone with forbidden books and has spent two centuries reading, waiting, and carefully not destroying the living who come too close. She locates her prey by breath. She has been waiting specifically for Mei.
Mei does not believe in hauntings. She believes in paperwork, steady hands, and the careful management of other people's grief. She does not believe in two-hundred-year-old women in red burial silk who leave plum blossoms on supply tables and write classical Chinese that still cuts.
But the barrier is failing. The original keeper is fading. And the woman who has waited longer than Mei has been alive is no longer content to remain in the dark of the garden.
Some connections, her grandmother wrote, are written in the bones of the world.
Mei is only here to settle the estate.
She is not staying.
She is not falling in love with a corpse that cannot die.
She is learning, too late, how to hold her breath-and when, finally, to let it go.
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Meridian, X. J.
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