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On the night before the wedding that was meant to end a blood feud, Ada Vale runs away. Her younger sister, Mira, takes her place. The marriage is a treaty: a Vale bride for the Voss fords, peace on the Sarrow bought with a woman's name. But Mira arrives at Vauntholm as a proxy bride in a hostile hall, wed to Aldric Voss — a young margrave with a cold manner, a family full of secrets, and no reason to trust the sister of the woman he was promised. What follows is a slow, careful book about power in small rooms: the keys of a household, a locked casket, a dowager's questions, a cup that should not have been poured. Mira is not a warrior or a chosen one. She is a woman learning how far her sister's name will carry her, and what it costs to use it. The Proxy Bride is a political fantasy for readers who like their romance earned, their mysteries close to the hearth, and their heroines awake to the danger of being underestimated. Heads-up: poison, political violence, and a marriage under duress.

A boy crosses Route 9 with black cloth wound over his eyes and a gallon of cooking oil on his shoulder, and every woman at the bus stop has an opinion about it. That's New Kettering: a river city where the glassworks limps along, the plant runs second shift, and the neighbors will talk about your blindfold before they'll ask how you're doing. Adrian Voss can see. The book tells you that on the first page and then spends a long time with what it costs him to keep it quiet — Dana, his aunt, who works second shift with a bad neck and a yoga class she never attends, and Toby, thirteen, who asks no questions but has started noticing things about the dog. What he can't keep quiet is the thing in the alley, the office wedged between a wedding chapel and a crematorium, and the man named Eli Krantz who hands him a coin and doesn't flinch. There is a whole order under the city, with ranks and markers and paperwork, and it wants him. It's a book about power, but mostly about invoices: who gets to protect whom, and what it costs to be the one doing the protecting.

The Ward of New Kettering

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9 scenes · ongoing

Elliot Vance died, and then the rain brought him back, and the house on Winter Street had a son again — one without a heartbeat, and one his mother can't look at without flinching. He's eighteen. He has a younger brother, Milo, who makes costumes and sews name patches into coat linings, and who is the reason Elliot does anything at all. He has a job now, with the Wardens, which is how this city deals with the returned: a probationary seat, a chief who uses him, and a caseload of whatever comes out of the Grey. What he doesn't have is a way to keep the Coldbrook Street murders out of the file. He knows who was in that house. He knows what the Wardens will do once they know it too. So he works the case from the inside, slowly, badly, at a cost the book keeps counting — [Audience Expectation: 41%] — one survival at a time. A dark urban fantasy about a family that hurt its own, a city that came apart at the seams, and a brother who chooses the lie for as long as he can stand it. It isn't a romance, and it doesn't hand out clean endings by the chapter. It's the kind of book that makes a quiet house feel occupied.

The Heartless Warden

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9 scenes · ongoing

NINE OF TEN opens with a man on a concrete floor, a brass clock that won't strike, and a room with no door. Wes Corrigan is a liar by his own account, a man who prices a room before he decides what to say in it. None of that helps him here. What helps, sometimes, is arithmetic. What helps more is other people—their hands, their first-aid kits, their nerve—and Wes has never been good at needing other people. He wants out for one reason: his wife, Nora, isn't answering her phone. This is a locked-room survival novel with a calculator in one hand and a first-aid kit in the other. The rules are spoken aloud, tested, and revised. Alliances are made in plain terms and hold only as long as the terms do. No system. No levels. No chosen one. I wrote it for readers who want the puzzle and the people, and who don't need a hero to make the arithmetic work.

NINE OF TEN

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9 scenes · ongoing

The Formless Forge is an urban fantasy about inheritance as a bill that comes due. Cal Vane is seventeen and the heir to House Vane, a family of mineral rights and refiners in Fairhaven. His parents vanished three years ago. His acting head is Nadia Brant, nineteen, who keeps the family ring and runs the house with a cool hand and no explanations. Cal's three wells are empty, which makes him a public failure at Halcyon Academy and a private problem for everyone who wants the Vane name. Then he finds the Formless Forge. It grafts an aspect onto a blank and skips the impurities that ruin ordinary users. The price is lifespan, paid every time he uses it. Cal chooses to keep it secret, because the truth would turn him into a resource before he is ready to be one. This is a book of sparring halls and boardrooms, prism water bought by the crate, and a boy learning that a house is not a name but a ledger. It is for readers who like their magic school stories with business pressure, public matches, and a cost that stays on the page.

The Formless Forge

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10 scenes · ongoing

Three Ghosts and a Debt is an urban fantasy for readers who like their haunted houses with a lease attached. Milo Grant is eighteen and unbound in Halcyon, a city where ghosts are weather and a contract is the only thing standing between a person and a red file. He has one exam to prove he belongs in a school that has already sorted him into the back corner. The exam is held in a haunted gym. The rich kids bring family contracts. Milo brings a mouth and a phone. He passes. The win binds him to three ghosts: a deadpan analyst, a hymn that kills in groups, and a chainsaw that has already been on fire. Each one is a tool, a liability, and a mouth to feed. Each one makes him more useful to the families above him and more exposed to the ones he has already crossed. This is a book about leverage, debt, and the price of being clever in a city that keeps receipts. It has horror teeth and a dry laugh. It is not a romance, though there is an alliance in it that matters more than a romance. I wrote it for readers who want the ghost story to send a bill.

Three Ghosts and a Debt

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10 scenes · ongoing

At Harlow Bay High, Ethan Hale is the kind of student teachers call on only when they need the room to go quiet. He is good at math, good at keeping still, and not good at being seen. Then Wren Lennox comes back. Wren knows what Ethan is about to say. She knows how he can get closer to Cora Bennett, how he can get out from under his father’s careful accounting of every favor, how he can stop being the kid in the front row nobody picks. She offers to help. Each time she helps, she weakens. Ethan tells himself he can keep the help and keep his promises. Then the lies start to stack: to Cora, to his father, to the other Wren who shares Wren’s name and face and no memory of loving him. The Second Wren is a contemporary New Adult story about climbing, borrowing, and the things we ask of people who only ever wanted to be real to us. I wrote it for readers who like a back cover that promises a little heartbreak with the hope.

The Second Wren

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10 scenes · ongoing

Elliot Vance opens his eyes in a hotel room at the end of a plan he didn't make — a jacket he owns, a key card with no name printed on it, and, in the bathroom mirror, a pair of wrists covered in old, thin scars that no version of his life accounts for. He's inside a novel he read in one night, and the novel has already cast him as the villain. Then there's Adrian Hale. Thirty-two, an alpha, the reason the building Elliot has just been hired into is stacked thirty floors tall. He's spent years refusing to bond anyone, and his body has been failing at it quietly ever since. Elliot steadies him. That's a problem, and Adrian's way of handling a problem is to hire it and put it under contract. What follows is a book about care delivered in errands and rides home and a warm hand on the back of a neck, and about how much of that you can accept before it starts to cost you something. Close third person, deliberately slow, adult.

The Proximity Contract

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10 scenes · ongoing

Rural America, 1978. Nell Vance is fifteen, and she knows how to make herself small. Then a beating in the yard leaves her with a right hand that burns when it touches something valuable. She can't tell age or maker. She can only tell worth. What she finds: a silver coin hidden in an old toy, a family quiet enough to kill for, and a county that never stops watching. What she wants: money for the doctor, food for her sisters, and a way out that doesn't leave them behind. What she gets: a grandmother who corrects, a co-op that decides who eats, and a market where every sale is a new debt. Silver in the Hacky Sack is a period family drama with a ledger under its fingernails. It's about a girl learning the price of everything and the cost of being the one who pays. I wrote it for readers who love a hard-won dollar and a heroine who keeps count.

Silver in the Hacky Sack

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12 scenes · ongoing

The Black Sheath is a secondary-world fantasy about debt, in every sense. Ren Calder is a Kindling-ranked apprentice in an Order that keeps its ledgers straight: seats, stipends, ley shards, punishment. His master, Aldric Vane, is dying of wounds dealt by a man beyond Ren's reach. The cure is in the Godfall Reach, which opens once a decade and closes on everyone still inside. Ren enters with a broken sword, an iron shard that has gone silent, and a promise he will not set down. Around him: a one-armed swordsman with a debt of his own, a Wildkin heir who will not be commanded, a village girl holding a seal she should never have touched. The story moves from trials to feuds to open war, always asking what loyalty costs when the powerful treat a secret as a gift. For readers of martial arts fantasy, mystery, and slow-burn bonds. I wrote this for anyone who has ever kept a promise past the point where it was reasonable.

The Black Sheath

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19 scenes · ongoing

Cinder is a fire spirit who used to cover a valley. After one disastrous meal and the strike that followed, he wakes inside a boy named Owen Penn, in a small Pacific Northwest town where the only magic he can find is the kind people keep in their kitchens. He can't leave. He can only take power by eating. So he works at Tanner's, delivers food, and tries to understand a world that has no place for what he is. Then he meets Rennie, a girl who feeds him without being asked and wants a contract he keeps refusing. Her family has secrets. The town has secrets. And Cinder's own past is a debt that hasn't finished coming due. The Hearth Contract is a contemporary fantasy about food, family, and the quiet agreements that hold both together. It's warm, strange, and full of small choices that cost more than they look. For readers who like their magic served at a kitchen table, with the bill folded underneath.

The Hearth Contract

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19 scenes · ongoing

Nate Hollis is a junk-shop dealer in Albuquerque, a former combat engineer, and a man with a debt to a dead friend. He pays it by opening what was closed: old graves, old mines, old places that were meant to stay shut. It is not a noble trade, but it is a trade, and he is good at it. Shirley Vance walks into his shop with a photograph and a question. Her father went into the Sonoran Desert looking for the Seventh City, a place Spanish soldiers wrote about and never found. She wants him back, or she wants proof. Nate wants the money. Neither of them says what they are really afraid of. They join a small expedition into the Sierra Hueca. The guide tosses a coin before every decision. The professor explains away every legend. The desert gives them a mine, a sealed door, and a candle that goes out when something is near. The city is not empty, and it is counting them. This is a book about guilt, survival, and the cost of curiosity. It is quiet horror and hard walking, with a first-person voice that sounds like a man telling you the truth after midnight. I wrote it for readers who like their adventures with a dry mouth and their endings with a hook.

The Seventh City

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19 scenes · ongoing