The Worst Possible MatchInvestigative journalists Claire Whitmore and Ethan Mercer have spent years sabotaging each other’s careers. Claire is fearless, impulsive, and impossible to intimidate. Ethan is precise, patient, and ruthless with a source. They know each other’s professional weaknesses, private fears, and worst habits, and neither has ever hesitated to use that knowledge.When a whistleblower disappears after uncovering The Lattice, a secret society of the city’s most powerful people, Claire and Ethan are forced into an operation neither of them can refuse. The Lattice controls political reputations, business deals, court decisions, and media narratives through a web of blackmail and manufactured scandals.Its members only welcome married couples.Claire and Ethan must enter as newlyweds: brilliant, volatile, possessive, and wildly devoted. Their cover has to survive elite dinners, private rituals, loyalty tests, and calculated temptations designed to expose every false note. The Lattice’s members are experts at reading people. They notice a delayed touch, an unconvincing argument, a protective instinct that appears at the wrong moment.To sell their marriage, Claire and Ethan turn their hatred into a performance. They stage cruel fights with just enough truth to hurt. They use old grudges as evidence of intimacy. They exploit each other’s scars, triggers, and insecurities to look like a couple whose devotion has become dangerously obsessive.But the deeper they go, the more real their protection of one another becomes.Claire wants to publish everything before more people disappear. Ethan wants to stay long enough to expose the mastermind behind The Lattice. As their competing agendas threaten the mission, they must decide whether their fake marriage is a weapon, a trap, or the first honest thing either of them has ever had.

The Black LedgerMarek Vasiliev is a gentle accounts clerk for the Black Ledger, Velesgrad’s most feared crime syndicate. He endures its cruelty to fund his sick mother’s treatment, protect his younger sister Anya, and someday restore Zorya Bread House, the bakery his family lost.When Marek uncovers proof that the syndicate’s cruel leader, Boris Dragunov, plans to purge his own lieutenants, he is summoned to answer for it. A devastating panic attack ends with Marek killing Boris, then desperately concealing the crime and sending proof of the boss’s death to rival groups.The syndicate’s deadliest figures mistake Marek’s terror for ruthless strategy and name him their new ruler. Trapped beneath a reputation he never wanted, Marek must choose between escaping into the quiet life he longs for or using the Black Ledger’s power to bring down the criminal empire that has poisoned Velesgrad.Sources