The Baron's Bargain is a dark Vodou romantasy for adult readers.
Beyond this point: explicit language and themes.
You must be 18 or older to cross.
The lwa of the dead doesn't knock. He climbs inside you.
Saint-Domingue, 1791. To get her stolen daughter back, an enslaved woman strikes a deal with the lord of the dead himself. Three wishes, his to claim, paid with her body.
He is a Black lwa, a spirit of death and of the obscene. She is a woman with one word he cannot take from her: no.
And every wish he claims costs him a piece of himself. He cannot stop.
Haitian Vodou is a living religion practiced in Haiti and across the Haitian diaspora. This novel is a work of fiction.
Haitian Vodou is a living religion practiced in Haiti and across the Haitian diaspora. It grew from West and Central African religious traditions carried across the Middle Passage and transformed in Saint-Domingue under slavery and colonial rule.
A few things worth knowing. The spirits of Vodou are called lwa. They mediate between people and Bondye, the supreme creator. In some Vodou initiatory traditions, a person may receive a ritual name that reflects a bond with a lwa. In this novel, the name Dantor functions that way: it marks religious belonging, not blood descent.
Under the French colonial system, enslaved people were denied civil status, and France's legal system of hereditary surnames did not apply to them. In this novel, ritual naming becomes one way of claiming an identity an owner cannot define.
This novel is a work of fiction.
mèsi anpilS. Ferro
The Baron's Bargain is a dark romantasy for adult readers, set in Saint-Domingue in 1791, on the eve of the Haitian Revolution.
It contains chattel slavery and colonial violence, period language and racism, the trafficking and peril of a child, referenced sexual assault, coercion inside a bargain struck under pressure, explicit sexual content, death, body horror, a mother's grief, and supernatural possession. The novel draws on Haitian Vodou while fictionalizing its lwa, rituals, and possession mechanics.
The complete chapter-by-chapter guide is below.
Please review the notes before continuing if any of these themes may be difficult for you.
The drums are already starting.
Tags mark what a chapter contains, not how graphically. When in doubt, the heavier reading is later in the book.
The night they took Anaïs, I fell face down in the dirt with her pink ribbon still wrapped in my fist.
My grandmother pulled me back by the arm. "Pa bouje, Zora." Don't move.
"Celle-là," Father Moreau said, looking from his ledger to my daughter. That one.
Three nights later, Zora walks into a cemetery and calls the lwa of the dead. Uncensored. 18+.
"We both get what we want. You get your daughter, and I get your cunt. Or whatever else I desire."
"Go fuck yourself, you sick twisted bastard."
The Baron & Zora, striking the bargain
"I wanted the filthy, blasphemous god to come apart in my mouth with no joke left in him."
Zora
Day three of following her scent, the lord of the dead is wearing a dead horse in a ditch. Then he notices what's between its legs.
"Do you mind if I try it out?" I asked the horse's ghost.
"Don't you dare go near my cock," the ghost snapped. "You've got your own, you dead old pervert. Show some respect, for Bondye's sake."
The Baron & the horse
"You always say that right before you start spending pieces of yourself that you can't get back." Maman Brigitte · the Baron's consort, matriarch of the cemetery
He's a lwa, a spirit of death. She's a slave. And every wish he claims, he pays.
S. Ferro is releasing pieces of The Baron's Bargain on the way to launch: scenes, lines, and forbidden little glimpses. Read everything revealed so far, oldest to newest.
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