**Married to My Brother's Billionaire Rival**He destroyed my brother. Now he wants to marry me.Elena Hart has three days before her family's company is auctioned off and her father's heart gives out under the weight of it. Then Adrian Blackwood walks into her father's office. He's the cold, ruthless billionaire who burned her brother's dreams to the ground, and he's offering to erase every debt.The price? One year of marriage."I don't want someone else. I want a Hart."She tells herself it's only business. Smile at the dinners, sign the papers, walk away free. But Adrian isn't the monster she expected. He asks permission before he kisses her. His hands tremble when he thinks she isn't looking. And in a locked drawer in his study, Elena finds a file with her name on it, full of photos that go back seven years, to before the feud ever began.Why has he been watching her all this time?And what did her brother really ask him to do?Some betrayals are just love in disguise. But how much of the truth can Elena survive?

# The Lantern Keeper of HollowmereThe night the sun failed to rise over Hollowmere, Wren was seven years old and asleep in the lighthouse's cold kitchen, curled beside a stove that had burned down to ash.She remembered waking to her grandmother's hands on her shoulders."Up, little moth. We have work."The windows were black. Not the black of night, which has stars and moon in it, but a flat, swallowing black, as though someone had pressed a thumb over the world's eye. Out on the marsh, the Hollow had begun to breathe.That was what the villagers called it, the thing that lived in the mere. Most days it slept beneath the green water, a vast and patient dark. But when the sun forgot its duty, the Hollow rose, and anything it touched came away emptied: fishermen who forgot their own names, dogs that stood staring at walls until they starved.Wren's grandmother, Odalie, lit the great lantern at the top of the tower. It was the only light that had ever held the Hollow back. The flame in it was not oil or tallow. It was something older, silver-white and quiet, that Odalie fed with a pinch of salt and a whispered word.By dawn, which came late and grey, the Hollow had sunk again. The village was safe."Why does it come?" Wren asked, pressing her face to the cold glass."Because it's hungry," said Odalie. "And because someone, long ago, promised it a light to remember by, and then forgot to keep the promise. Hungry things don't forgive that."---Wren was seventeen when her grandmother died.It happened quietly, in the autumn, in the same kitchen chair where she had told a hundred stories. Wren found her at dawn with her hands folded and the stove still warm. The old woman had left a note beneath the salt jar, written in her slanting hand:*The flame wants a keeper who is willing to be known by it. Do not be afraid. Be honest.*Wren read it six times and understood none of it.She understood it even less when the village council came up the causeway with their lanterns and their grim faces. Master Tolliver, the reeve, stood in the doorway with his hat in his hands."We're sorry for your loss, girl. But we need to speak plainly. The old woman kept the light. Can *you*?""I've helped her since I could walk.""Helping isn't keeping." He glanced at the tower stairs. "There's talk the Hollow's been stirring. The eels are leaving the shallows. The reeds went grey on the east bank. If the light goes out...""It won't go out," said Wren, and hoped she wasn't lying.---The flame did not go out. But it did not obey her, either.Each night she climbed the spiral stairs, salted the silver wick, and spoke the word her grandmother had taught her. Each night the flame flickered, sullen and small, and the dark pressed closer to the glass. By the third week, the marsh had begun to whisper. It was not words, exactly. It was the sound of a name being forgotten, over and over.On the twenty-second night, the sun did not rise.Wren stood at the lantern with her heart hammering and watched the black water lift itself from the mere in one slow, enormous breath. Reeds bowed before it. Mist coiled into shapes like hands. The Hollow came toward the tower the way a tide comes, patient and certain.She poured on salt. She spoke the word. The flame guttered to a coal."Please," she whispered. "Please, I can't do this alone."The Hollow reached the foot of the lighthouse and began to climb.---Wren did not remember deciding to go down.She only remembered the stairs, and the heavy door, and the cold that met her on the threshold. It was a cold with no wind in it, no weather, only absence. The Hollow filled the causeway from edge to edge, and where its mist touched the stones, the moss simply ceased to be.It had no face. But it turned toward her, and she felt it *listen*."I don't know how to keep the light," Wren said. Her voice shook. "My grandmother is dead and I don't know the right words and I'm so tired of pretending I do."The Hollow did not move."The flame wants a keeper who's honest. That's what she wrote. So that's the truth. I'm afraid of you. I'm afraid of the dark and of failing and of the whole village looking at me like I'm a candle that won't catch. I don't know what you want."The mist trembled.And then, from somewhere inside it, there came a sound like a very old voice remembering how to speak.*A light... to remember by.*Wren stared. "That's the promise. The one somebody broke."*I was lonely,* said the Hollow. *They lit a lamp for me, in the beginning. A small one. So that I would know I was seen. Then the lamp became a wall. A weapon. They kept it only to keep me back.*Wren thought of her grandmother's hands, steady on the lantern, never once speaking to the dark. Never once asking its name."Oh," she said softly. "Oh, she didn't know."*No one asked.*---Wren sat down on the cold stones.It was not what the stories said a hero should do. But she was tired, and the Holl