She gave her submission to a stranger. He was never a stranger at all.---------Vivian Ashworth is the perfect executive assistant. Polished. Professional. Unflappable. Nobody knows about her secret life: the anonymous platform where she kneels for a Dom who calls himself Sir. For six months, he's commanded her through screens and encrypted messages, pushing her limits, learning her body, knowing things about her desires she's never told anyone.By day, she works for Alexander Kane—CEO of Kane Industries, demanding perfectionist, the kind of boss who makes assistants cry and competitors tremble. She hates him. She respects him. She definitely doesn't dream about him.Then Alexander says four words that shatter her world: "Or should I say... Velvet?"Her anonymous Dom. Her impossible boss. The same man.He's known who she was from the beginning. Every confession she typed in the dark. Every fantasy she whispered through her phone at 2 AM. Every time she begged for permission to come. He was testing her. Training her. Waiting.Now he wants to formalize everything. A contract. Total power exchange—at work and in his bed. No more hiding. No more pretending. Complete submission in exchange for complete care.She should refuse. She should run. She should report him to HR and never look back.Instead, she's kneeling in his penthouse, reading the contract, and realizing her body has already signed.But Alexander has enemies. His bitter ex-submissive knows their secret and wants revenge. The lines between professional and personal are blurring dangerously. And Vivian is discovering that surrender isn't the same as weakness—it's the most terrifying kind of strength.The contract says no feelings. The contract says power exchange only. The contract says this is an arrangement, not a relationship.The contract is about to become a problem.Will she sign away her heart along with her submission? Or will the man behind the mask prove that control and love aren't mutually exclusive?

She was his weakness. They never knew she was his secret. For four years, Elowen Vayne carried the weight of a marriage that was killing her. They called her sickly. They called her a poor excuse for a Luna. They never asked why a healthy young noblewoman wasted away in her own house — and she never told them, because she didn't know.Her husband Alpha Doran Blackwood knew. He had paid a hedge-witch to bind his wolf debt to his wife's body, dumping years of unpunished sin into the woman the pack pitied. Every cruelty he committed, Elowen carried. Every life he took, she paid for in fevers and nightmares she could not explain.When Doran finds his fated mate — beautiful, ambitious Selene — and rejects Elowen in front of the entire pack, the binding shatters. Everything Doran forced her to hold comes roaring home to him, and everything that was hers comes home to her.She collapses in the courtyard. The pack laughs.Then the Lycan King arrives.King Vaelor of Velmoria has spent twenty years on a throne that was never supposed to be his, ruling in the long shadow of his older brother — Crown Prince Castien, murdered the night of his coronation. He is the most feared man in the kingdom. He has never loved a woman. He came to Ironbough Pack to find the source of a dark binding his witches had been tracking for two years. He found a half-dead noblewoman in the dirt with two heartbeats and his dead brother's eyes flickering behind her own.He carries her home without a word.What unfolds in the Lycan capital is gentler than anything Elowen has ever known — and more terrifying than anything she imagined. Because as her body heals and her dreams begin to surface, she realizes she has never been only herself. Twenty years ago, on the night Castien was murdered, his soul found a newborn vessel. Elowen has spent her entire life carrying the rightful king of Velmoria in her chest, and she is the one woman in the kingdom Vaelor cannot allow himself to love — because if she remembers everything, the throne is hers.But the conspiracy that killed Castien is still alive. The man who orchestrated his murder still sits on the king's council. And Elowen Vayne — the wolfless wife everyone discarded — is about to become the most dangerous woman in the kingdom.Will she survive long enough to become herself? And when she does, will the Lycan King kneel for her — or fight her for the crown? #StarryWritingMarathon

The dagger goes in before she understands her consort is the one holding it.———My name is Irene, and at twenty-two I am Queen Regent of Alastor. My scales are pink and teal and sunset-gold, the color of a reef at dawn. I have seven months of reign, a kingdom that loves me, and a consort I am going to marry in three weeks.My consort is the one holding the blade.I fall into the Forbidden Zone with his voice in my ear — *You were never going to be the queen this kingdom needed, Rose is everything you are not* — and every stroke downward the Hollow drinks my color, my voice, my breath. As I sink through the dark I understand, in a rising tide of memory I can no longer outrun, what I refused to see: my cousin Rose has been his lover for three years. My uncle Rick has been my father's killer for seven months. My mother's sealed list named them all. And the ninth name — the one underlined — belongs to a woman who has been waiting two hundred years for a princess stupid enough to fall.I hit the Hollow's floor among the skeletons of seven women who came before me. I should die there. A black pearl pulses in the dark and asks me one question. I say yes.What rises from the Forbidden Zone is not the princess they pushed.My scales burn blood-red shot through with molten gold and piercing teal, edged in obsidian. My voice shatters coral when I choose. I can drain a merfolk's power until their scales grey to driftwood, and I can shift any being between human and merfolk form. I walk back into my own kingdom through its mourning banners, past my own funeral dais, and into the great hall where my consort is reciting the toast he prepared for my death. I sit on my own throne. I eat his bride's dinner from his bride's plate. I tell him, pleasantly: *Finish your toast. I want to hear how the sentence ends.*But the pearl hungers. Black veins creep across my chest with every life I take. My grandmother's ghost warns me I am becoming the eighth in a line of women who all went mad. A human washes up in a storm I didn't mean to summon, and his storm-grey eyes see me the way nobody has ever seen me. My Bayou cousin Mabelle arrives with rootwork magic that may be the only thing holding the pearl's hunger back. And the woman in the blue veil — my *older sister*, she calls herself; the other pearl-holder; the true architect of my father's murder and my husband's betrayal — is writing me letters I cannot burn fast enough.She has been waiting for me since before my great-grandmother was born. She does not want to kill me. She wants to join me. She wants to ride my body back to the bottom of the Hollow and wake the god the Tide Mothers buried there.The coup that broke me was never about Liam. It never even started with my uncle.And the throne I want back? It was never the prize.It was the trap.———Will Irene become the villainess her kingdom fears? Or will she remember the girl they buried long enough to choose what kind of queen to be?And the older sister who has been waiting two hundred years to use her — what happens when Irene decides the family she was born into is not the one worth dying for?

I've been a bride four times but never a wife—until I accidentally married a billionaire playboy when his fake wedding fell apart. Now I'm Mrs. Dominic Ashford, and this disaster is legally binding.The deal is simple: play the devoted wife for one year, collect two million dollars, then divorce quietly. But living with Dom means late-night conversations, undeniable chemistry, and a jealous ex-girlfriend who'll destroy me to get him back. His controlling family hates me, the press is circling, and his grandmother is far more manipulative than anyone realizesI've been abandoned at the altar four times, so I know better than to believe in fairy tales. This marriage is just business, nothing more. But Dom looks at me like I'm more than a contract, and I'm terrified of what happens when I start looking back the same way.Can I survive a year of fake marriage without catching real feelings, or will the billionaire I accidentally married become the fifth man to break my heart? Because in my experience, love is just another word for inevitable disaster.