Wicked Court

She was sent to the Wicked Court to retrieve a stolen treaty document.
She carried three slim knives, a cipher lens, a memory-thread cuff,
and seven years of Glass Veil training.
She was told Prince Dacien would be the most dangerous thing in the building.
No one told her the Wicked Courts wards were failing.
No one told her the treaty had two copies.
No one told her that the prince already knew her name.

Lyra Vale enters the Wicked Court as Lady Mirelle Vaust, a minor pleasure envoy decorative enough to be underestimated. She has been trained for precisely this: to become what the room expects, to count guards while admiring architecture, to read danger in a goblets temperature and opportunity in a badly staffed corridor. Her mission is simple enough to fit on a single briefing page. Find the treaty document. Duplicate or remove it. Return before the seventh diplomatic convocation.

The Wicked Court is famous for beauty because beauty lowers the knife arm. It is famous for pleasure because pleasure loosens discipline. It is famous for bargains because fools enjoy feeling chosen while they are being priced.

Prince Dacien is not what the intelligence files described. He is the courts chief negotiator, its most carefully controlled political instrument, and the person who was watching the entrance when Lyra arrived and already knew what she was before she reached the first reception. He is also the person who does not expose her. Not because he trusts her. Because the treaty she came to steal is not the treaty she thinks it is, and Lyra Vale finding the correct version first may be the only way either of them survives the faction that has been using both their countries as instruments.

The Wicked Courts wards are failing. Not from ordinary decay. From deliberate sabotage by a faction old enough to predate the treaty, sophisticated enough to corrupt both sides of the negotiation simultaneously, and patient enough to have been engineering exactly this diplomatic convocation for six years. The beautiful, dangerous court is about to become a war room whether it consents to or not.

For readers who want their political dark romance built on genuine intelligence rather than performed danger, their spy heroines given adversaries worth the full complexity of their training, their morally grey princes made to choose between institutional loyalty and an honest clause written in public view and their first peace treaty written in plain language, legible to anyone willing to read it.

A dark paranormal romance. For adult readers. Contains themes of political deception, coercive treaty systems, and two kingdoms learning to negotiate honestly for the first time.