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 today by millions. The lwa are not gods; they are divine spirits. This novel is a work of fiction.
Haitian Vodou grew out of West and Central African traditions carried across the murderous Middle Passage and held onto through generations of slavery.
A few things worth knowing. The spirits of Vodou are called lwa. They are not gods; they are intermediaries between humanity and Bondye, the distant creator God. When a person is consecrated to a lwa, she may take that lwa's name as a sign of belonging, not of bloodline. A woman called Dantor belongs to Ezili Dantor; she is not descended from anyone of that name.
Enslaved people were denied family names of their own, and a spirit's name was a way of claiming an identity no owner could sell.
mèsi anpilS. Ferro
The Baron's Bargain is a dark Vodou romantasy written for the adult reader, set in Saint-Domingue, 1791, on the eve of the Haitian Revolution. It contains colonial violence, period-accurate language, a mother's grief, explicit content, possession dynamics drawn from Haitian Vodou, and a woman who walks into a bargain with the spirit of death and walks out with more than she came for.
If any of the themes in this novel are difficult for you, please review the notes below before continuing. Sensitive readers, take note. The rest of you: the drums are already starting.
The summary above is the quick version. The full chapter-by-chapter guide is below.
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, funny, 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 shot back. "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 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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