Giving upcoming authors a chance to shine

She never planned on being discovered. Melissa Roberts spent years singing covers from her bathroom, building a following she never chased and a reputation she never asked for. When an offer from one of the most powerful entertainment companies in the world lands in her inbox, she almost deletes it. She almost wishes she had. Inside Monarch Entertainment she finds everything the music industry promised her and everything nobody warned her about. A CEO whose interest in her goes far beyond her catalog. A contract with a clause designed to control more than just her career. And a producer named Gael Moreno who hears her voice once through a studio monitor and understands it in a way no one sitting behind a boardroom table ever will. What grows between them is real. It is also forbidden from the very first night. What grows in the man at the top of the building when he realizes he cannot own it is something else entirely. Patient. Possessive. And years in the making. Off The Record is a story about what the music industry takes when it decides it wants everything. About two people who tried to build something honest inside a machine that was never designed to let them. About the price of loving someone in a space where someone powerful has decided that love is a liability. It does not end the way you hope it will. Some songs were never meant to be released. Some stories were never meant to stay quiet. This is both. mature themes | dark romance | music industry | forbidden love | drama © Relle H. all rights reserved.

She was not supposed to be this easy to lose. He came home from eighteen months overseas to a city that had moved forward without him and a best friend who had promised herself to a man with a beautiful face and a controlled smile and something underneath it that Nicholas Kwon could not name but could not stop seeing. He said nothing. He waited. He watched from a distance while the distance grew into something he could no longer pretend was manageable, and by the time he found the words, there was a ring on her finger and the door was already closing. She thought she was making a choice. She did not know that choices can be engineered, that love can be manufactured as a trap, that the man who shows you the world is sometimes already calculating how to own it. By the time she understood what she had walked into, the exits had been sealed so gradually she had not noticed them closing. This is not a love story that arrives easily or ends without cost. It is a story about what it takes to fight for someone who cannot yet fight for themselves, about what control looks like when it lives in a mansion and wears the right shoes and speaks in the right voice. It is a story about a woman who loses herself in the worst possible way and finds the long road back through art and grief and the patient, unshakeable presence of the one person who refused to stop being there. The darkness here is not decorative. The love here is not simple. Neither of them resolves cleanly. Dark. Slow. Explicit. No shortcuts taken. No easy landings. Only the long, costly, entirely earned truth of what survives. Reader discretion is strongly advised. ©️ _RelleLebby_//R. L.

Han Jisoo does not make mistakes. He plans, he executes, and he does not stop until the thing he is chasing has been brought to its knees. Four years of calculated movement across continents, four years of shedding every softness he was born with, and he is finally close enough to the truth about his mother's death to feel it in his bones. He was not supposed to acquire a variable. She was not supposed to be there. Vesper Cole had no intention of becoming anyone's complication. She came to Seoul on her own terms, chasing distance and a byline, and she would have left the same way if the wrong street at the wrong hour had not placed her directly in the path of a man with nothing left to protect and a situation that demanded an immediate solution. She is not passive, she is not manageable, and she is not staying quiet about any of it. She did not choose this world. She will survive it anyway. But quiet is no longer the most dangerous thing in the room. Somewhere behind them, a woman who claims what is hers has noticed. And what she claims, she will not release without a fight that none of them are prepared for. Her jealousy is not small and it is not soft. It is precise, and it is building. The trail moves from Seoul to Hong Kong, from Tokyo to Macau, from Macau to Paris. A Korean mafia enforcer whose entire existence has been constructed around a single purpose. A Black woman from Memphis who was in the wrong place and refuses to be erased because of it. A former boyfriend with secrets that restructure everything she thought she understood. A possessive love that has curdled into something dangerous. ©️ _RelleLebby_//R. L.

Two bodyguards. One cartel queen in silk. A city that forgives nothing. They swore to keep their distance-and her alive. Only one of those vows will survive Barcelona. ©️ Relle H

Elianna Bennett is 25, careful, and very good at keeping things contained. Seo Jae-hyun is 24, famous, and living a double life that is slowly taking him apart from the inside. One concert. One backstage encounter. One decision that seems, at the time, like nothing more than a beginning. Seven years later, they are still carrying what that beginning made. And the world is about to find out. Set between Seattle and Seoul, THE HANNAM-DONG SECRET is a slow-burning interracial romance about two people who fell in love at the wrong moment in the wrong circumstances and chose each other anyway - across an ocean, across a secret, across a daughter who grew up knowing her father through a phone screen and her first word was for him anyway. This is not a story that moves quickly. It earns what it arrives at. There is grief here, and distance, and choices that cost more than anyone planned for. There is a little girl who sees more than the adults around her have accounted for. There is love that is real and still, sometimes, not enough - until it is. If you are looking for a fast burn, keep walking. If you want something that stays with you - the kind of story that asks something real - this is yours. Drama. Distance. Two people learning, slowly, what it means to stop hiding. ©️ R. L.

Some things are taken from you. Your family. Your freedom. Your body. And still, you survive-changed, scarred, and angrier than you've ever been in your life. Myra Sanches has already lost more than most people twice her age could bear. At seventeen, she's navigating grief, rage, and a new reality that no one prepared her for-one where the people in power aren't just corrupt, they're catastrophically dangerous. When she finds herself confined inside a facility that has no intention of letting her leave, she discovers she's not the only one. Behind reinforced doors and surveillance cameras are others just like her: a French boy with wings that have never known open sky, a Japanese hacker forced into digital servitude, Korean brothers whose abilities are as volatile as their rage, and twin children who know far more than anyone realizes. What Vardi Corporation built in secret, Myra intends to tear apart publicly. But escaping isn't the hardest part. The hardest part is what comes after-rebuilding trust, surviving the fallout, protecting the people she's come to care about, and deciding what kind of person she wants to be when the world is watching. This is not a story where love saves the day or trauma disappears neatly. It's messy, violent, slow, and real. The Onyx Project is a slow-burn interracial ensemble drama with mature themes, explosive action, and a Black female lead who refuses to be anyone's weapon-or anyone's salvation-except her own. Some fires don't burn out. They spread. ©️ _RelleLebby_// R. L.

Kira Thompson doesn't trust easily-not after the ambush in East Africa that killed her teammates and ended her military career. Betrayed by her commanding officer and lover, she disappeared into the ruthless world of private security, where emotions are liabilities and trust gets you killed. Liang Jun has everything: wealth, status, and the reckless confidence of a man who's never faced real consequences. As the son of China's ambassador to the UN, he's more interested in Shanghai's nightlife than the credible assassination threats against his life. Bodyguards are inconveniences. Rules are suggestions. And the scarred American woman assigned to protect him? Just another obstacle to ignore. But when the Qing Triad makes their move, Jun realizes Kira isn't just a bodyguard-she's the only thing standing between him and a brutal death. Forced into proximity, their explosive clash of wills ignites into something neither can control. She sees past his careless facade to the man beneath. He sees past her armor to the wounds she hides. As betrayal circles closer and old enemies resurface, Kira must decide: keep her walls up and do her job, or risk everything for a man who's already claiming her shattered heart. In a deadly game where love is the ultimate weakness, survival might cost them everything they never knew they needed. ©️ Relle H

Rae Innes never planned on raising her niece and nephew alone, but she's determined to keep Jordyn and Marcus safe-no matter what. A weekend retreat at the sprawling, high-tech Sunnyside Estate should have been a chance to catch their breath. Instead, it becomes a labyrinth of secrets, shadows, and sudden danger. When socialite guest Lila Anderson meets a mysterious fate, Rae finds herself swept into a puzzle that challenges her wit, courage, and trust. Her sharp observations, Jordyn's keen eye, and Marcus's restless energy draw them all into a web of intrigue-suspicion doesn't spare anyone. Every sleek hallway, every modern smart-home glitch, and every whispered secret brings them closer to the truth...if they can survive long enough to uncover it. ⸻ ©️ _RelleLebby_