Nightbloom Press

Marina Sokolov's father put her up as collateral on a three-million-dollar loan to the Zarkov Bratva. Twenty-four years later, Dmitri Zarkov comes to collect. He doesn't want the money back - he wants her married to a man who will hand him a shipping empire. She refuses. He gives her thirty days. She spends them learning everything about his organization, his enemies, and the daughter he hides in Switzerland. On day twenty-nine, she makes him a different offer: she'll marry him instead, and in return he'll spare her father and owe her one favor, later. He accepts. The marriage is a war of attrition until Dmitri's uncle tries to kill him and Marina puts a bullet in the man's leg. That's when Dmitri finally understands what he bought. The favor she claims has nothing to do with him, and that may be the most intimate thing she's ever done. He signs it without a word. She understands.

Zwei Jahre Asche. Ein Keller. Eine Saatgutbank, für die Menschen tten. Hester Vane hält den letzten Steinobstbestand im Nordwesten am Leben in einem Erdkeller unter elf Fuß grauem Schnee. Die Regeln sind einfach: keine Fremden, keine Karten, keine Ausnahmen. Dann stürzt Ivo Corrigan durch die Schneewehe, mit einer Kiste Saatkartoffeln und einem Mund voller Fragen, die sie sich nicht leisten kann zu beantworten. Sie bringt ihm bei zu veredeln, zu schweißen, durch Stoff zu atmen. Er bringt ihr bei, genau einem Menschen wieder zu vertrauen. Was sie nicht weiß: Jemand hat ihn bereits geschickt. Als die Gruppe vom Government Camp den Grat hinunterkommt, um den Tresor zu holen, muss Ivo sich entscheiden zwischen dem Geschäft, das ihn ernährt, und der Frau, die ihm beigebracht hat, wofür eine Veredelung gut ist. Er entscheidet falsch, dann entscheidet er richtig, und beides hat seinen Preis. Eine langsam brennende Postapokalypse-Liebesgeschichte für Leserinnen und Leser, die eine Liebe aus Arbeit, Wetter und der letzten funktionierenden Handpumpe am Berg wollen.

Two years of ash. One cellar. A seed bank worth killing for. Hester Vane keeps the last stone-fruit stock in the Northwest alive in a root cellar under eleven feet of grey snow. The rules are simple: no strangers, no maps, no exceptions. Then Ivo Corrigan falls through the drift with a crate of seed potatoes and a mouth full of questions she can't afford to answer. She trains him to graft, weld, breathe through cloth. He trains her to trust exactly one person again. What she doesn't know is that someone else already sent him. When the crew from Government Camp comes down the ridge for the vault, Ivo has to choose between the deal that keeps him fed and the woman who taught him what a graft is for. He chooses wrong, then he chooses right, and both have a cost. A slow-burn post-apocalyptic survival romance for readers who want a love story built out of work, weather, and the last working hand pump on the mountain.

Six years I wrote the Bayou Teeth's history. Every run log. Every wedding toast. Every funeral program for a brother we buried too young. I was the club's memory, and I kept every secret they ever handed me - including the ones I made with the Road Captain on his couch in the back room. Then he pinned his patch to a paralegal from Baton Rouge at the Fourth of July picnic, and I put my pen down for good. Six months later, the feds serve the Bayou Teeth with a RICO subpoena and my name is in the paperwork. Dupre shows up at my desk at the parish records office with a smile I've seen him use on judges. He needs me to remember. He needs me to write. This time he's going to answer my questions on the record, in front of a lawyer, and I'm going to keep writing it all down - including the part where he tells me why it was her and never me.

Mara Quinlan hat schon einmal ihre Hand auf eine Schusswunde gepresst. Aber noch nie auf die eines Fremden, mitten auf dem Highway, um zwei Uhr nachts. Der Fremde ist Kell Roarke, ein Nomade, der etwas für den Copperhead MC bei sich trägt etwas, für das drei andere Clubs tten würden. Er hätte die Nacht nicht überleben sollen. Sie auch nicht. Jetzt sitzen sie in einem Safehouse außerhalb von Tucson fest: ein einziges Wegwerfhandy, eine Wunde, die nicht aufhren will zu bluten, und die Männer, die auf sie geschossen haben, kennen Maras Subaru. Kell sagt, es dauert drei Tage. Es sind keine drei Tage. Es ist lange genug, um zu erfahren, woraus sein Schweigen gemacht ist. Lange genug, damit er begreift, dass eine Frau, die beruflich Menschen sterben sieht, nicht leicht zu erschrecken ist. Lange genug, damit beide aufhren, sich vorzumachen, dass alles vorbei ist, sobald das Paket abgeliefert ist.

Hazel Ruiz has towed a lot of rich men's mistakes off the coast highway. Bishop Kade is the first one she keeps. He's got a fund, a club, and four days until a vote that decides everything - and October has other plans. Stranded in a fishing cabin with one bed and no cell service, they trade the truth in pieces. But when the road opens, Bishop's rival knows exactly where he's been. Hazel has one chance to keep him alive, and Bishop has one chance to prove he's worth keeping. He gives up the gavel. She keeps the man.

Reese Okonkwo's laundromat has washed worse than blood. She's a binder - she writes contracts that even demons have to honor - and she has never once signed one herself. Until Callum crashes through her back wall, bleeding ichor, offering her block protection in exchange for one unnamed favor. She signs. The favor is a wedding. His court needs him married or unseated, and a binder with no faction is the only bride no one can use. Reese moves into a warded apartment, learns his true name from a servant, and discovers the prince she married is himself indentured - to the same court bleeding her street dry. To break him free, they'll have to write a contract that kills them both on paper. Blood and Bargain is a dark urban paranormal romance of binding oaths, forced proximity, and two people who negotiate their way into love.

The Blackridge pack sold Cassandra Wyre to the vampire court when she was fourteen, because her touch poisons wolves and they were too cowardly to kill her. Twelve years later she escapes the court as one of them - fangs, hunger, and all. What she doesn't expect is to be captured by the same pack that sold her, and to come face to face with the new alpha: Vann Blackridge, the boy who once smuggled her bread through a barred window. Vann rejects her in front of the whole pack to save her life. It doesn't work. The rejection-bond shatters open for not one mate but four - Kirin, the enforcer with shadows on his skin, and Theo and Bram, the vampire envoys who came to drag her home. Now the pack is hunting them, the court is hunting them, and Cass is about to find out what a belladonna witch can do when she's done running.

Nova Cruz is the last silver-blood wolf - the only creature alive who can kill an alpha with one bite. When the Blackridge pack captures her, their alpha, Sevryn Dragh, does the unthinkable: he rejects her as his fated mate before the bond can form, then chains her in his keep to use as a weapon. But the bond he severed doesn't die. It festers. It burns. And every night, Nova feels him through the broken thread - and knows he feels her too. When a traitor inside Blackridge nearly kills them both, Nova and Sevryn must fight side by side. She saves his life. He breaks her chains. The mate bond they rejected comes roaring back - stronger, chosen, and impossible to deny. Some bonds are fate. Theirs is a choice. And choices can burn the world down.

Fallon Reyes spent a decade keeping the Iron Serpents alive. Then her own brother sold her to cover a debt. She expected to die in a cartel basement. She didn't expect three men in tailored suits to shoot their way through the door - three billionaires who ride like outlaws and wear the Serpents' old patch on their jackets. Bishop wants the club back. Trey wants the money trail burned. Jonas wants the men who took her dead. All three want Fallon - and Fallon wants all three, in a war where trust is the only currency. When she uncovers the truth about her father's death, she has to decide who rides beside her. Turns out the answer is three. A hard, hot why choose MC billionaire romance.

A low tide in January uncovers what ninety winters have kept. Eleven men under a shelf of sand. All adult, all male, all buried the same night. All with the same healed break in the ribs - the mark of men who loaded cargo the same way for the same company. Dr. Owen Tsai comes over from Seattle to read the bones. Marisol Vance runs the deck on the boat he rides in on, and she has known about that stretch of beach since she was six, because her grandfather told her never to look. Some companies keep records. This one kept a beach. A Bainbridge Island horror mystery about a night crossing no one wrote down.

Priya Nair's sister eloped two weeks before a non-refundable honeymoon in Sardinia. Priya went anyway. She planned to swim, drink cheap white wine, and be gloriously alone. The villa has other ideas. So does Matteo Serra, the owner's son, who arrives with a clipboard, a clause about double occupancy, and no intention of leaving. Fourteen days. One villa. One hundred and forty square meters of polished floor, bad plumbing and grout arguments. He criticises her cooking. She's a food stylist. He rearranges her sunbed. She hides his shoes. He is also, she discovers on day six, hiding something in the walls - something his mother left, something worth more to him than the building they're both standing in. Priya could leave. She offers to help instead. It will take them eleven days to find it, one storm to lose it, and one flooded kitchen to admit they've both been counting the days wrong. An enemies to lovers, forced proximity, foodie contemporary romance.

The contract was signed when Delphine Marchand was nine years old, and she has never read it. Her father is dead. The Sable Hills motorcycle club has sent its sergeant-at-arms to explain the terms. Ivo Ramas offers her a choice between the front gate and his truck, and only one of those is a real choice. For six weeks she lives in the clubhouse. She cooks at the common table. She's branded on the wrist. She's shown to other debtors as an example, and Ivo is the reason it stops there, and Ivo is not kind. Delphine learned accounting from her father before she learned anything else. In the club's office there is a clause in the original contract that voids the debt if the labor exceeds fair value, and she keeps a ledger of every hour. When she files the contract, the club's books go into audit and the sergeant-at-arms is asked to step down. Bought and Branded is a dark bully captive MC romance about a debt paid in time, and the man who walked out with her.

Mairi Rennoch was sold to end a feud. She packed her own bag, got on the horse, and did not look back, because a debt to a stranger is still better than a lifetime behind convent walls. Torcall MacIver did not want a wife. He wanted the feud closed, a household that ran while he was on the road, and a woman intelligent enough not to ask him for anything. What he got was a woman who knew his riders' names inside a season, found a debt he had forgotten, and rode out at dawn with six of his men to return an ambush that had been sent to him. He locked her out of the byre. She stayed out. It rained for three hours before he thought better of it. He married her for peace. He keeps her for a reason he hasn't said out loud yet.

Karina Solis plays second chair cello in an orchestra quietly financed for nine years by a man who turns out to be a werewolf, a bratva captain, and the alpha of a pack that's falling apart. When the orchestra is dissolved and her visa runs out, Lev Novik offers her a private teaching position at his country estate - a cover he buys the way he buys everything, without asking. Karina reads the terms, says no, and is moved into the east wing anyway. Over one long hostile winter she becomes the only person in the house who won't accept his silence: she teaches his half-turn cousin to read, plays music in rooms that have none, and finds the file that explains why his own sister left and took the south holdings with her. When Yekaterina arrives with bratva muscle in a snowstorm, Karina is the one who negotiates - with a written contract, a borrowed wolf, and a cello case full of paper. She wins. She doesn't forgive him for any of it. She signs the next contract anyway.

Giulia Moretti's grandmother left her a trattoria, six tables, and a debt she cannot pay. Salvatore Cassini offers a way out: marry him, merge their families, and keep her kitchen. She says yes because she has no other choice. She doesn't expect him to be kind. She doesn't expect the quiet rituals of a man rebuilding a broken empire, or the way he watches her cook like she's the only thing still living in his house. But the rival family that wants his territory also wants her restaurant, and they will burn both to the ground before they let the Cassinis rise again. A forced marriage mafia romance with a slow, warm burn at its center.

Verrazzano Academy trains the heirs of five crime families. Mira Vansetti is there on a scholarship she didn't earn and a name she shouldn't have. When she witnesses a chapel killing, the five heirs don't kill her. They claim her. Dante owns her schedule. Enzo owns her debts. Raf owns her name. Teo owns her secrets. Luca owns her confessions. Five protections, five leashes. But protection has a price, and the price is the ledger her mother died over. Mira has one semester to play the heirs against each other before they break her - and one chance to take the sixth seat they never meant to offer. A dark reverse harem mafia academy romance with five possessive heirs, one defiant girl, and a debt written in blood.

Josie Park wrote the piece that got the Titans' coach fired, and nobody in that building has spoken to her since. Now she's embedded with the team for a full season, and three of them have long memories: Marcus, the quarterback she took apart in print. Theo, the safety who called her a vulture on live radio. And Coach Rennie, who knows exactly why she's really here. When Josie finds a story that would end Marcus's career, she sits on it - and the three of them find out. What starts as a truce becomes something the entire locker room has quietly agreed not to name, and the playoffs are coming.

Ilaria Sarno was married at nineteen to settle a debt she never owed. Cassian Vook gave her a room, a surname, and a list of places she was allowed to stand. For eight months he treated her like something he'd bought and might resell. It was almost bearable. Then her mother's letter arrived with a ledger page inside, and Cassian stopped treating her like inventory and started treating her like evidence. She ran in the spring. She got eleven weeks. When he finds her in Portugal he isn't angry, which is the worst part. He's already sold the east wing. He's already moved her things. He's already told his men there will be a christening. But the name on the ledger isn't Cassian's. It's the man who walked her down the aisle.

I was sold to the most dangerous man in the city. He didn't want a wife. He wanted a ledger entry. Salvatore Bruno runs the capo seat with a butcher's precision, and I was the payment my father couldn't refuse. I planned to survive him quietly. Then someone aimed a gun at his sister, and I stepped in front of it. Now the man who signed our marriage like a receipt won't let me out of his sight. He's hunting the shooter, and every clue drags me back to the family that raised me. My uncle sold me. My husband wants him dead. And I'm standing in the middle, learning that the only person in this house who hasn't lied to me is the monster I married. I was a bride bought and paid for. I'm about to become something else.

Anya Volkova has one season of dancing left and a brother buried in a vampire's debt. When the Crimson Court calls in the loan, they offer a trade: Anya becomes the arranged bride of Dmitri Volkov, the Court's exiled first son, and the debt disappears. Dmitri has spent eighty years alone in a Siberian estate, guarding grief he won't name. He doesn't want a bride. She doesn't want a husband. The contract has a one-year exit clause, and they both plan to use it. But the estate is the last holding of an older bloodline, Anya's blood opens its altar, and the Court wants what it exiled. The clause comes due the night the soldiers arrive.

The charter has one rule nobody's used since 1984: marry out to make peace. My brother nominated me at the table like he was offering an engine part. The groom was Kade Vasquez, sergeant-at-arms for the Saguaro Vipers, a man who has pointed a gun at my brother twice and stopped himself both times. We got married in a garage. I do his books now. We sleep on opposite sides of the same bed and don't talk about it. Then I found a second set of ledgers in his saddlebag, in my brother's handwriting, with a cartel's routing numbers running down the column. And last Tuesday my brother blew up a clubhouse with two people inside. I'm the one who found the detonator. I'm the one who gave it to my husband. I'm the one they let decide whether my brother goes in the ground or in a cell. A forced marriage MC romance about loyalty you inherit and loyalty you choose.

Micah Tolan has been a Bright Ridge prospect for eighteen months and a federal informant for six. He has a handler in a parking garage, a burn phone in his boot, and a best friend who would die for him - which is the problem. Ilsa Vance has spent twenty years inside outlaw clubs, and she has never once trusted a man like Micah. He lies too easily. He cares too much. He's going to get someone killed, and she's going to be standing there when it happens. They were supposed to manage an investigation. Instead they've built an alliance neither of them planned on, and it's running on borrowed time. When the raid goes sideways and the club turns on its own, both of them have the same choice: the file or the person. Nobody walks away clean. Some of them just walk away alive.

Micah Tolan ist seit achtzehn Monaten Prospect bei den Bright Ridge und seit sechs Monaten Informant für das FBI. Er hat einen Kontaktmann in einer Tiefgarage, ein Wegwerfhandy im Stiefel und einen besten Freund, der für ihn sterben würde - genau das ist das Problem. Ilsa Vance hat zwanzig Jahre in Outlaw-Clubs verbracht, und noch nie hat sie einem Mann wie Micah vertraut. Er lügt zu leicht. Er kümmert sich zu sehr. Er wird jemanden umbringen lassen, und sie wird daneben stehen, wenn es passiert. Sie sollten eine Ermittlung leiten. Stattdessen haben sie ein Bündnis aufgebaut, das keiner von beiden geplant hat - und es läuft auf geliehener Zeit. Als die Razzia schiefgeht und der Club sich gegen sich selbst wendet, haben beide dieselbe Wahl: die Akte oder der Mensch. Niemand kommt sauber davon. Manche kommen nur lebend davon.

St. Orsino College has been washing mafia money for ninety years. It calls this an endowment. Kit Aurelio rings the chapel bell for family funerals to pay off his mother's debt. Ori Castellan is here because his family buried his brother and needed somewhere to put him. They meet at 2 a.m. in the bell tower, both trespassing, both lying. The Dean catches them and offers a deal: keep the bell ringing, keep the Castellans calm, keep the Delanes off campus. Neither of them has a choice. By winter they are sharing a room, sharing a bed, and lying to their own families about it. Then Ori's uncle orders Kit to pull a trigger, and Kit has to decide which betrayal he can live with. A dark MM college mafia romance about bullets, bells, and the tuition nobody pays.

The land was supposed to be a quick sale. Bury her grandmother, sign the papers, go back to Nashville. Then Marisol Vance found the letters - and the name of the man her grandmother married when Marisol was eleven and too angry to notice. Wren Callahan is twenty years older than her, road captain of the Vipers, and standing on her porch like he has a right to be there. He says he promised her grandmother he'd keep the land safe until Marisol came home. He says he's been keeping that promise for eight years. But the club has a buyer, the buyer has a torch, and Wren has one favor left to call in. When the barn goes up in flames, Marisol has to decide whether the home she ran from is worth the man who stayed.

Calder Sloane left Bianca Quinn on a Thursday with a ring in his pocket and never once explained. Eleven years later he's back in her kitchen, rifle by the screen door, guarding a dying man's estate - and Bianca has been hired to appraise every acre of it. The old man's will is a list of four families who owe him. His fields hide a stolen herd. His lawyer won't meet eyes. And Bianca's own brother is on the list. She should walk away. She already walked away once, in the other direction, with worse timing. But Calder kept the ring. Bianca's about to find out what eleven years of that looks like.

Bianca Costello war ihr Leben lang eine Investition. Eine Braut wird sie nicht auch noch. Ihr Vater hat sie Salvatore Moretti versprochen, dem Capo, der die Boston Bolts als Fassade für alles betreibt, was er wirklich tut. Bianca will ihn ffentlich abweisen und in Chicago ihren MBA beenden. Doch Sal will keine folgsame Ehefrau. Er will die Frau, die seinem Consigliere bei ihrem eigenen Verlobungsdinner widersprochen hat. Zur Hochzeit schenkt er ihr die Analytics-Abteilung des Teams und eine ganze Saison, um sich zu entscheiden. Als die rivalisierende Familie Jagd auf sie macht, schließt Sal die Lücke zwischen ihnen so, wie er es kennt: mit allem, was er hat, und jedem, den es kostet. Sie wollte ihr eigenes Leben. Er bot ihr seines.

Bianca Costello spent her whole life being an asset. She won't be a bride piece too. Her father promised her to Salvatore Moretti, the capo who runs the Boston Bolts as a cover for everything he really does. Bianca plans to refuse him in public and finish her MBA in Chicago. But Sal doesn't want a docile wife. He wants the woman who corrected his consigliere at her own engagement dinner. He gives her the team's analytics department as a wedding gift and the entire season to decide. When the rival family comes for her, Sal closes the gap between them the only way he knows how - with everything he has, and everyone it costs. She wanted her own life. He offered her his.

Sofie Bianchi has spent nine years refusing to become what her family wanted. Then her brother is arrested, and the family asks. Now she runs St. Cassian's from a corner of the library, keeping the sons of allied families in line until they're old enough to be useful. She's good at it. She hates that she's good at it. Then Gianni Accardi shows up - the other captain, the boys' side, the person the family should have handed the job to. They hate each other on sight. They also want the same thing: to keep a fourteen-year-old named Milo out of the pipeline. Doing that means going behind both their families' backs. A high school capo romance about two people who inherited a war and decided, once, to lose on purpose.

They cut the C in half. Neither of them thought that was a metaphor. Sloane Petrakis earned the captaincy. Ben Aldridge was promised it. Now they split a season, a locker room, and a team that can't decide which of them to follow. The rule was simple: nothing off the ice. No favors, no forgiveness, no feelings that could be mistaken for either. Then the athletic department assigns them to coach a youth clinic together twice a week, and eleven-year-olds don't care about their rivalry. They just want a team that works. By February, Ridgeport is one scandal and one brawl away from losing the co-ed pilot for good - and Sloane and Ben are the only two people who can save it, or the only two who can end it. They played the whole season against each other. They'll finish it side by side.

Wren Kaur has worked for the Sarno family since she was seventeen. She has never asked who she works for. She has never asked why Adrien Sarno took her in. She asks when he has her dragged off a job, hooded, into a Marseille warehouse on his own orders. He wants a name. He wants to know who signed off on a hit he never authorized. She gives him the name. He doesn't let her go. Six weeks in one room. No witnesses. Old rules. Older debts. And the man she has obeyed for a decade, finally telling her the truth - while keeping the door locked. When the traitor in his house shows his face, only one of them is going to walk away from the family. It isn't going to be Adrien.