The Proxy Bride
READING AGE 16+
Mira Vale was never supposed to marry Aldric Voss. Her sister was. But Ada is gone, and the treaty needs a bride, so Mira rides into Vauntholm under her sister's name and marries the man whose family blames hers for a field of dead men.
Aldric is cold from the first night. He gives her a room, a household that watches her, and a warning she does not understand. He does not touch her, does not trust her, and does not pretend the marriage is anything but a border agreement written in a woman's body. Mira tells herself she can live with that. She has survived worse in a dream she cannot explain.
Then a locked casket becomes a test, a cup is poured that should not be, and she begins to see that someone in Aldric's house wants the proxy bride gone before the peace can hold.
What grows between Mira and Aldric is not easy and not quick. It is built out of suspicion, small mercies, and the things neither of them says. But in a hall where every kindness can be a trap, wanting him may be the most dangerous thing she does.
Heads-up: poison, hostile marriage, and political violence.
Unfold
The water came up in cans, two women to a can, and by the last can it was barely warm. Mira stood in the tub with her hair pinned off her neck and her arms crossed while they went over her with the cloth and the soft soap, and the steam came off her shoulders and hung under the ceiling in the cold, going nowhere. She was eighteen years old. S……
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