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6 stories found · by Last update

The Petal Runner

by S.C. Carrow

  • 5 Chapters
  • 50 Pages
  • 13,754 Words

Eevi Rantanen coordinates weddings for Helsinki’s elite with ruthless efficiency. She is also a smuggler for whom champagne crates and imported lilies make excellent cover. Her careful life shatters when the influential Koivisto family demands a single, spectacular winter wedding—and forces her to co-plan it with Tuomas Aalto, a rival planner who runs his events with military precision and seems inexplicably immune to her usual tactics. The stakes are much higher than floral arrangements: both Eevi and a dangerous fringe element need access to the rare, tightly controlled 'Luoto' blooms, a proprietary hybrid flower cultivated exclusively by the Koivistos, required for the ceremony, and fiercely guarded for its lucrative pharmaceutical properties. Forced into constant proximity to pull off the high-society event of the season, Eevi must manage bridezillas, caterers, and Tuomas’s sharp, observing eyes, all while executing the biggest extraction of her career. But as Tuomas begins to anticipate her moves, Eevi realizes her rival might have secrets of his own—and that falling for him might be the one complication she can't manage.

The Hushlight Court

by Sutton Aldercott

  • 5 Chapters
  • 51 Pages
  • 14,241 Words

Neshtaran Ovaldar fixes problems for a living — the kind her family's trade business can't put its name to. When the Vessaran Court opens its gates to outsiders for the first time in a generation, she's the one sent through them, with eight days to deliver a contract, collect payment, and get out again before the gate seals for another lifetime.

She doesn't plan on staying. She doesn't plan on falling for the court's grim, gorgeous Kindler, the man sworn to tend the rare light that keeps Vessaran's halls warm — and that is quietly, beautifully consuming every noble who touches it too long. She doesn't plan on discovering that her own brother's secrets are already inside the walls with her, or that the court's careful peace is built on a rot everyone has agreed not to see.

By the time the gate closes, Nesh has to decide what her family's loyalty is actually worth — and what she's willing to become to keep the people she loves, on both sides of the wall, from disappearing.

Nine-Maps of the Hollow Passes

by L.A. Dunn

  • 5 Chapters
  • 46 Pages
  • 12,650 Words

Straton Ilvenos once mapped the safest road through any mountain in the Myrren Dominion — until one survey too honest cost him his rank, his order, and his name. Now he sells what he still does best: maps of places people would rather keep dark.

A killing wind ahead of its season drives him to the Aekelion, a lone inn on the Skorrhas Pass whose stone walls have held back worse storms than this one for three generations — for a price nobody who shelters there is ever told. When the old keeper dies holding that price back with her own hands, Straton finds himself trapped for the length of the storm with the very Order that ruined him, and with raiders who'd just as soon put a knife in everyone under that roof.

He came to read stone and get paid for it. He's about to learn what happens when the thing keeping you alive is quietly, patiently eating you instead — and that the only way out might be to break the one shelter for a hundred miles in either direction.

Every Note, Translated

by S.C. Carrow

  • 5 Chapters
  • 45 Pages
  • 12,465 Words

Ishbel Vranagh has spent six years turning other people's words into safety — for touring musicians who don't speak the local language, for hosts who don't understand why an orchestra needs three encores and a hot meal by nine, for a Maestro who found her at a rail platform with nothing and never once asked why. She's the best interpreter in her profession because she hears everything: the lie under the compliment, the threat under the toast, the tremor in a voice trying not to shake. It's a gift. It's also the reason she has never let anyone hear her all the way back.

When the touring orchestra's new manager arrives to clean up a scandal his predecessor left behind, Ishbel expects another suit who'll last a season and go home. Brogan Dunmuir isn't going anywhere. He reads contracts twice, asks the questions no one else bothers to ask, and within a week he's noticed what six years of easier men never did: her papers don't quite add up.

She needs him to stop looking. He needs her to stop hiding — because the tour's opening night depends on the one skill only she has, and the city they're about to play has a custom of putting its guests' honesty on public, unscripted display.

Station by station, the tour will carry them somewhere Ishbel swore she'd never go again. But first, she has to get through the first stop without either of them finding out how much the other already suspects.

The Drowned Registry

by N.G. Foster

  • 7 Chapters
  • 86 Pages
  • 23,922 Words
  • 12 Views

Twice a day, the tide recedes to reveal the drowned ruins of a lost empire. Below the waterline sit glass bottles filled with captive storms, fog banks, and sheer heat, waiting to be claimed. Scavenging them is a race against the incoming sea.

Nineteen-year-old Elias Crane plies this desperate trade with a bad leg and no crew, dodging the monopoly of the major salvage companies. But the ancient registry that rules the coast still functions, binding every diver who opens a live weather bottle. When Elias cracks his first, he receives a rare, misunderstood class: Pressure Reader. While other Scavengers pursue raw stats and brute-force skills to crack the glass, Elias can see the volatile forces tearing at the edges of the stable bottles. By manipulating those internal pressures with careful build choices, he discovers an entirely different way to play the registry's game.

With a superstitious pilot at his back and a retired registry clerk helping him untangle edge-case rules, Elias sets out to break the coastal monopoly. To survive, he doesn't just need a bigger blade—he needs to see the cracks in the world before the tide comes back in.

Odds of Return

by Ignatius Sorrell

  • 1 Chapter
  • 9 Pages
  • 2,489 Words
  • 3 Views

In the city of Kordava, every fighter's strength is public knowledge, chalked up on the arena boards before every match—and where the numbers are known, the bets never stop. Dorvan Kesztasy doesn't fight and he doesn't bet. He steals: quick, quiet, and only long enough to put something back where it belongs, into the hands of whoever the Circuit's rich and ranked just cheated. It's a code, not a kindness, and it's kept him alive in a city that would rather see him hanged.

Then his sister steps into the ring for the biggest match of her life, the odds get quietly rigged against her, and Dorvan runs out of small crimes to fix it in time. The night she dies is the night the world resets—dawn of the same week, same boards, same odds, and only Dorvan remembers what's coming.

He gets good at losing her. Loop after loop, he learns the size and shape of the trap closing around her match, and starts closing it back. But the power that lets him try again was never free, and what it wants paid isn't coin. Someone is going to ask Dorvan to use everything he's learned about the people he loves against them—and in a city where the whole crowd is always watching the odds, there's no version of that choice he can steal his way out of.