Kitt Blackbriar has never wanted a throne.

She has wanted full bellies, open roads, frightened tax collectors, and enough coin stolen from the king’s coffers to keep her people alive through winter. In the deep woods of Blackbriar, they call her the Laughing Thorn: thief, outlaw, nuisance, and the sharpest blade in a rebellion no one at court wants to admit exists.

Then Kitt robs the wrong royal caravan.

Hidden among the tithe chests is the Verdant Crown, an ancient relic of thorn, gold, root, and bone. The king claims it is his and will answer only to him. The old stories claim it once chose the rulers of the realm.

For Kitt, it blooms.

Now the false king wants his crown back, the starving villages are whispering that the forest has chosen a queen, and Kitt is being hunted by the one man disciplined enough to catch her.

Worse, the crown is not only waking for her. It is calling others to her side: Bram, the brutal forest-born Shield who loved her before prophecy found her; Kellan, the disgraced royal Sword sent to drag her to the gallows; Tristan, the silk-tongued court spy whose lies are almost as dangerous as his kisses; and Evander, the forbidden holy man who knows the crown’s blessing may be a curse.

Kitt refuses to kneel. She refuses to be worshiped. And she absolutely refuses to become the kind of ruler she has spent her life robbing.

But the king is bleeding the land dry.

And the crown did not choose a woman who could be tamed.

It chose a thief sharp enough to steal a kingdom back.

Kaida was raised to be the weapon that ended dragons.

The last of a winged people whose name has been lost to history, she bears a weapon no smith could forge: twelve feet of white wings, every feather edged in living metal and honed sharp enough to cut through flesh and scale. Beneath a king’s command, she has spent her life mastering them for one purpose: to kill monsters no one believes still live.

Then an ancient dragon egg is unearthed beneath the capital, and Kaida is sent to claim it before anyone else can.

She is too late.

A notorious thief steals the egg first, dragging Kaida into a hunt beyond the borders of everything she knows and toward a truth powerful men have spent generations burying. Because dragons are not gone. Her people were not what she was taught. And the war that nearly destroyed them both may never have truly ended.

Now old enemies are stirring, forgotten blood is calling, and something ancient has begun to awaken.

Kaida was forged to slay dragons.

She may have been born to stand beside them.

A novel of desire, betrayal, and the cost of being wanted.

Mara Ellis was twenty-one when she learned that being wanted could feel like being chosen.

Drawn into a hidden world of private parties, whispered invitations, and rooms where desire has its own set of rules, Mara mistakes attention for power and compliance for freedom. At first it's awkward, thrilling, humiliating, intoxicating, a life impossible to look away from. Then she becomes the woman everyone remembers. The one couples ask about. The one men want beside them. The one women make feel chosen enough to say yes.

For a while, being wanted feels like proof that she matters.

But the deeper Mara falls into the world of swinging, adult nightlife, and the business of bodies, the more her life begins to split in two. Publicly, she is magnetic, desired, and untouchable. Privately, she is lonely, betrayed, and starving for tenderness from the very men who taught her to call self-abandonment freedom.

As parties become business, desire becomes currency, and betrayal hides behind the language of freedom, Mara is forced to question everything she thought she understood about love, sex, loyalty, and choice. In a world where bodies are easy to offer and harder to protect, she must decide whether the life she has built can ever give her what she truly needs, or whether the woman everyone wants has been disappearing all along.

Tessa Whitaker knows how to run a room.

By day, that room is The Ink House, her cozy arts-district café filled with regulars, espresso, and more emotional support pastries than should be legally allowed.

By night, it’s the private club upstairs: An invitation-only space for swingers, kink, and the kind of honest adult fun most people are too nervous to say out loud; a place built on trust, consent, and the Whitaker family tradition of giving people somewhere safe to be exactly who they are.

Tessa is very good at what she does and she understands the rules:

Keep things controlled. Keep things casual. And never, under any circumstances, let herself be the one who gets hurt.

What she is not good at is Graham Mercer.

Graham is a museum conservator with careful hands, a controlled life, and the kind of quiet, steady energy that has no business being as attractive as it is. He comes to the Ink House looking for the history of the old printing press hidden inside the building.

Instead, he finds Tessa.
Her café.
Her club.
And a world he definitely did not see coming.

He should be a brief distraction. A little temptation. Maybe a very pretty problem.

Instead, he keeps showing up.

And the more Graham learns about Tessa’s world, the more dangerous he becomes to hers.

Because casual is easy. Chemistry is manageable. But a man who looks at her like he could want all of her?

That has never been part of the plan.

At Calloway House, power is inherited in blood, money, and silence.

Before the sons of ruling families are allowed to take their places in the world, they must prove they know how to protect it. Each year, one good girl is chosen to be tempted, compromised, ruined, and discarded before anyone important ever has to answer for what was done.

They call it The Good Girl Games.

This year, they all want Evangeline Cabot.

A sheltered Vestal Daughter of the Luminant Order. White dresses. Soft voice. Untouched reputation. The kind of girl powerful men dream of staining because they think purity makes better prey.

They should have asked who taught her to wear the halo.

Evangeline is a lie.

Nina Locke did not come to Calloway to survive their game. She came with a borrowed name, a saint’s wardrobe, and a list of clean men who built an empire on buried crimes. Hush money. Broken girls. Bought silence. Charities polished bright enough to hide the rot underneath.

Her father knew where the bodies were buried because he helped bury some of them.

Then they buried him too.

Now Nina wants the whole machine.

Every man who tries to ruin her gives her another secret. Every gift becomes a weapon. Every touch becomes evidence. Every heir who thinks he found the woman beneath the saint learns how beautifully bad men beg.

Nina plans to use them all.

But one monster learns faster than the rest.

And Nina has always known the value of a dangerous thing on its knees.

They made a game out of ruining good girls.

Nina Locke came to ruin the game.

Men have killed for her before they knew her last name.

Others have followed her across cities, broken into locked rooms, drugged her, restrained her, or tried to murder anyone they believed stood between them. It takes less than a day for desire to become obsession, and once the Thrall takes hold, refusal only convinces them that someone else must be keeping her from the love they are certain she feels too.

So she survives by leaving first.

She has spent years moving from one false name to the next, searching for the truth behind the affliction that has made closeness more dangerous than loneliness. When the only clue to the parents who abandoned her is stolen, however, she cannot afford to disappear. She has to follow the thief who took it.

And somehow, he keeps walking away from her.

Their uneasy alliance begins only after he sees what the Thrall truly is, and nearly dies when one of her newest admirers decides that touching her has made him a rival worth killing. Soon every place they stop leaves another obsession behind them, while their search for a cure draws them toward something older and more dangerous than either expected.

The thief has never confused wanting with love. He has wanted women, wealth, freedom, and whatever else caught his eye, then walked away when he was finished.

But he cannot seem to walk away from her.

And as desire becomes attachment, and attachment becomes something neither of them knows how to name, the question between them grows more terrifying than any stranger hunting in their wake.

Because if he loves her, there is no way to know whether she has finally found the one thing the Thrall cannot create...

or whether the most dangerous obsession of her life is the one she wants to believe.

Dr. Helena Marwood has spent her career proving that death is not always as certain as men claim.

At thirty-seven, she is already disgraced in London medical circles for her studies on premature burial, false death certificates, and the quiet ways inconvenient women vanish beneath respectable paperwork. So when a letter arrives from a remote Romanian village claiming her young niece has died suddenly after marriage, Helena knows grief is not the only reason she must go.

The coffin has already been sealed.

The villagers are polite, devout, and watchful. The local doctor refuses to let Helena examine the body. The priest urges her not to disturb the dead. And beneath every whispered prayer is the same old superstition: the vampire lord in the mountains has taken another bride.

Helena does not believe in vampires.

She believes in murder.

But Dorneanu Manor waits above the village in candlelit silence, and Count Valeriu Dorneanu is no ordinary legend. He knows Helena’s name. He knows the forbidden work that ruined her. And he knows far more about the sealed coffins of the village than any innocent man should.

As Helena follows a trail of missing brides, falsified deaths, and old rites buried beneath chapel stone, she must decide whether the monster she came to accuse is truly her enemy, or the only one who has been listening for the women no one else would hear.

Because in this village, some graves are not meant to hold the dead.

And Helena may have been summoned for one of her own.