Cruel Rite

My father was shot dead in a parking garage in June. By October, his debt is mine.

Nobody asks me to sign for it. The clerk slides the sheet across the counter, Ferrante, Isadora, and tells me it’s already on the roll.

So I give the place one year. Long enough to find out who killed him, and gone before the balance gets called in front of four hundred people.

My uncle has other plans. He’s already promised me to the Ashgrove heir, and that paper is drawn.

Then, at the Michaelmas Rite, a masked man interrupts the binding words and claims me under a society law older than the university.

It’s signed and witnessed in front of the whole campus. No clause in it lets me end it.

There’s one that lets him.

It takes me out of the marriage and into his house, onto his third floor, under his rules.

He puts a lock on my door that only opens from the inside. He stocks the medication I’ve never told anyone I take.

I read every document twice. I count when I’m frightened. I have been through this one line by line without ever finding what it costs me, and that scares me more than he does.

I don’t know that the man behind the mask is Dante Corvane. Heir to the family I was raised to hold responsible for my father’s death.

The man I sit across from in seminar every Tuesday morning.

I came here to find out who killed my father.

Falling for the house I blame for it was not part of the plan.

Cruel Rite is a dark college mafia romance with masked claims, forced proximity, and a possessive heir who falls first and never apologizes for it. Enemies to lovers. Touch-her-and-die hero. Dark academia. Virgin heroine. Cairnwood Elite, Book 1. Dual POV. HEA guaranteed. 18+.