One dead man's will. One bride. Three husbands. Alessia Moretti agreed to marry a Vittale to save her father's name. She did not agree to marry all three. Luca negotiates. Dario breaks things. Matteo hates her with a heat that has nothing to do with hate. They think the arrangement makes her theirs. Alessia has other plans. She is going to learn every schedule, every account, every soft place in that house - and then she is going to run it, with all three of them standing behind her. Until a rival syndicate offers her the one thing she actually wants: freedom. A forced marriage mafia reverse harem romance.

The Bainbridge Island Playhouse opens in seven days. It has no Titania, a frayed rope nobody ordered, and a dead actress in the light grid above the stage. The county calls it a fall. Cass Merrick, who has stage-managed this building for eleven seasons and slept in the booth through two of them, knows the grid was inspected Tuesday. As she rebuilds the show around a new Puck, Cass notices the dead woman had been rewriting the lighting cues - quietly, deliberately, marking the moments when someone was in the back lot who shouldn't have been. Cass knows how to call a show. She's less sure she knows how to survive one. A cozy theatrical murder mystery set on Bainbridge Island, from the booth side of the curtain.

Das Testament eines toten Mannes. Eine Braut. Drei Ehemänner. Alessia Moretti willigte ein, einen Vittale zu heiraten, um den Namen ihres Vaters zu retten. Sie willigte nicht ein, alle drei zu heiraten. Luca verhandelt. Dario zerstrt Dinge. Matteo hasst sie mit einer Hitze, die nichts mit Hass zu tun hat. Sie glauben, die Abmachung macht sie zu ihrem Besitz. Alessia hat andere Pläne. Sie wird jeden Zeitplan, jedes Konto, jede weiche Stelle in diesem Haus kennenlernen und dann wird sie das Ruder übernehmen, mit allen drei Männern hinter sich. Bis ein rivalisierendes Syndikat ihr genau das anbietet, was sie wirklich will: Freiheit. Eine Mafia-Reverse-Harem-Romanze über eine Zwangsheirat.

Her father left her a dying empire. He also left her three men. Bastien, who taught her everything and trusts her with nothing. Emile, who loved her mother and now looks at her the same way. Nico, who can open any door in Europe and has never once told her the truth about why he is here. Valentina Moreau has nine weeks to clear her father's debt to the Corsicans, or the family goes into the sea with him. She does not have time to choose. So she doesn't. She puts them all to work. Then she puts them all in her bed. Then she finds out who killed her father - and makes all three of them prove what they are willing to do about it. A dark reverse harem mafia romance set on the Marseille docks.

Lark Okafor has one job this year: keep her fellowship. That means assisting the new executive-in-residence, a man she has publicly called a fraud in a seminar she was not supposed to be teaching. Roman Ashcroft built his reputation on being right. At forty-four, he is on campus for reasons he refuses to explain, and the first thing he does is get corrected in front of ninety students by a first-year who is not wrong. He is her boss. She is his assistant. The university has rules about that, and neither of them is the type to break a rule for no reason. Then he tells her why he came to Halcyon, and the reason has a name and a date attached to it, and the rules matter much less than they did yesterday. When the inquiry opens, someone has to walk away from the life they built. The problem is that neither of them is willing to let the other be the one who does it.

Ninety days. A ring. No feelings. Nora Bellamy has exactly nothing left to lose when Napa's most notorious billionaire slides a contract across her counter. Rafael Corvi needs a fiancée to keep his grandfather's vineyard in the family. Nora needs rent. It's the cleanest deal either of them has ever signed - until it isn't. Until his grandmother teaches her to make his childhood cake. Until the cameras catch a kiss that was never supposed to be real. Until Nora finds her own name on a document he never meant her to see. He bought her silence. He bought her building. He never once asked. She's about to walk out on live television and teach the most powerful man in wine country what a promise actually costs. A slow-burn fake engagement billionaire romance with heat.

Silas Ardent has run this company for eight years and has never once given an interview. I know why. I read the file nobody asked me to read: his wife, the accident, the settlement, the story the board sold to keep him in the chair. He doesn't know I know. He just knows I'm the first person in this building who tells him the truth. That's why he keeps me past midnight. That's why he puts his hand on my back in an empty elevator and doesn't explain it. Then the board asks me to bury something worse, and I have a choice: keep the job my father's care depends on, or publish the truth and lose everything. I published it. He stood next to me and lost it too. There's no board anymore. There's just the two of us, a rented office, and a man who finally sleeps at night.

Three weeks. One kitchen. No falling in love. Ana Lucía Ortega has catered for billionaires before. They don't eat. They don't laugh. They keep the heat off and count the staff passports. Theo Brandt is different. Theo Brandt eats standing over the sink, reads his daughter bedtime stories in a coat, and hasn't let anyone into the west wing in four years. Ana moves in anyway. She cooks. She builds a gingerbread village. She breaks every rule he has. Then his family starts asking questions about her visa, and Theo offers to fix it with a paper marriage. Ana says no. She doesn't want a favour. She wants to be chosen - out loud, in daylight, in front of people who called her the help. On Christmas Eve, she finds out what he's been grieving. And she cooks.

Dr. Noor Haddad has been an adjunct for eleven years. Eleven years of teaching other people's undergraduates, writing other people's syllabi, and watching other people's names go on her ideas. So at 1 a.m., drunk and done, she films a nine-minute takedown of the department's most decorated professor and posts it. By morning it has four million views. By Monday she's being investigated alongside the man she destroyed - except Elias Vance never wrote the paper she attacked. He's the only person in that building who has been citing her work for a decade. Now they're co-teaching a seminar neither of them wanted, being reviewed by a committee they don't trust, and slowly realizing the video that made Noor famous was never hers to begin with.