Sinful Serenity

The night the Korvens and Veylors turned Emberwick’s streets red, no one stepped between them. That’s the law here: when families go to war, the city looks away.

Until there are almost no heirs left to bury the bodies.

Dragged before the ruling council known as the Big Six, Konflict Korven hears his sentence, not his salvation: he will marry Serenity Veylor, the last surviving daughter of the man who gunned down his mother and smiled while she bled out on the marble floor.

They call it a peace pact. Konflict calls it a leash.

He agrees on one condition—silently, to himself. Twelve months. A year of cold sheets and clenched fists. If he can keep his distance, never reach for her in the dark or answer the heat in her eyes, the union dissolves and he’s free to finish what his family started: erase every Veylor name from Emberwick’s stone.

But Serenity doesn’t fit the monster he’s been sharpening his rage against. She leaves offerings at his mother’s grave when she thinks no one is watching. She smells like rain and expensive ink, moves through his house like she refuses to be small in it, and meets every threat in his voice with a steady, infuriating calm.

Days turn into nights spent listening to her soft footsteps in the hall, her quiet laughter behind closed doors that aren’t his. Want coils where hatred used to live, just as sharp, just as dangerous.

At the end of twelve months, Konflict Korven will not walk away unchanged. Either he burns the last of the old blood feud to ash…or he lets love be the newest, cruelest wound his family never forgives.