Gardenia series
★★★★★
4.8 rating from readers
THE WANING — Synopsis
Gardenia Series, Book 1
Serena Hawke | Vampire Romance | Heat Level 3
Nia Ashford is twenty-two, practical, and quietly falling apart.
She’s been waking at 4 AM for months — drenched in sweat, hollowed out by something she can’t name or explain. The local news is calling it a wasting illness. People are getting sick. Some aren’t recovering. Nia tells herself she’s fine. She tells herself the shadow she keeps seeing in her doorway is a trick of the light.
She’s wrong on both counts.
Desperate for something solid to hold onto, she walks into a community meeting and stumbles into the wrong room — sitting down across from a stranger who looks at her like she’s a ghost. DRAKE CORVIN is ancient, contained, and not looking for anyone. He has his reasons. He has centuries of them. Then he sees her eyes, and everything he’s spent five hundred years carefully burying refuses to stay down.
There is something hunting Nia. It has been hunting her family for decades, patient and methodical, always circling back. Drake knows what it is. His coven knows how dangerous it is. What none of them are prepared for is Nia herself — the questions she won’t stop asking, the instincts she shouldn’t have, the dreams arriving in a language she was never taught.
At Thornvale, the Corvin coven estate, Nia trains in psychic defense and ritual magic, learning faster than anyone expects. The dreams intensify: a forest clearing in Romania, gardenias in her hair, a dark-haired man whose face keeps slipping just out of reach. A name she doesn’t recognize rising from somewhere below thought.
Drake tells himself he’s protecting her. That’s all this is. He almost believes it.
The truth, when it arrives, doesn’t feel like revelation. It feels like remembering.
Some loves don’t end. They go quiet, fold themselves into bloodlines and bone, and wait. Nia has been carrying something ancient and enormous her entire life without knowing it — and now, with a new moon seven days away and a predator closing in, she is finally ready to use it.
The Waning is the first book in the Gardenia Series — an atmospheric, slow-burn vampire romance about power, memory, and a love five centuries in the making. For readers who like their vampires ancient, their heroines fierce, and their romance earned.
THE WANING is Serena Hawke’s first book. The Gardenia Series continues in DARK MOON.
The Gardenia series has two books written with a total of six in the series.
Plus there are five prequels planned.
The Waning will be published in 2026.
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