ARC Book
What He Owes Me Instead
Dark Paranormal Romantasy
Two hundred years ago, House Cresswell took a debt it could never truly repay: gold and protection from House Wexley, sealed by a clause nobody alive at the signing believed would ever come due. It has. Thistle Cresswell is the collateral. Not a bride in any sense she recognizes, a legal instrument, handed over the moment she came of age, married to a man who now holds the legal right to drain her if the debt isn't settled within a year. She expects a monster. She gets Caine Wexley: correct, distant, and visibly unwilling to do the one thing his own House's law entitles him to. He won't say why. She isn't sure she wants to know, not when knowing might mean trusting him, and trusting him might mean losing the only leverage she has left. But the year is shorter than either of them admits, and Caine has already started looking for another way to settle what his House is owed, quietly, against his own elders' wishes, for reasons he hasn't explained to anyone, least of all her. Behind Wexley Hall's locked doors and older laws, two people bound by a contract neither chose are running out of time to decide what it means to choose each other instead, and whether anything built on a debt can ever really belong to the people paying it.
