Giving upcoming authors a chance to shine

Mara Williams is twenty-four years old, drowning in debt, and running out of time. Working double shifts at Mel's 24-Hour Diner on Flatbush Avenue while her mother Clara fights cancer at Kings County Hospital, Mara exists in that brutal space between survival and collapse-too proud to beg, too desperate to keep pretending the math works. When she crosses paths with Dominic "Dom" Reyes at a Crown Heights loft party, the attraction is immediate but the danger is undeniable. Dom controls drug territory across the neighborhood with a quiet ruthlessness that commands respect from men who fear nothing, yet something about Mara pulls at him in ways he hasn't allowed himself to feel in years. What begins as a transaction-Mara making courier runs to cover her mother's bills-slowly becomes something neither of them planned for. Crown Heights is their backdrop: its brownstones and bodegas, its soca music and territorial corners, its beauty and its blood. As the rival Haitian crew led by Jean-Baptiste Laurent pushes into Dom's territory and a childhood friend's obsession turns lethal, Mara finds herself caught between the woman she was raised to be and the woman survival has made her. Keisha, her best friend, is fighting her own battle against an abusive partner. A determined detective is building a case that could imprison everyone Mara loves. Crown Heights is a slow-burning interracial love story about the price of surviving a world designed to crush you-and what it costs to find redemption once you've already paid. ©️ _RelleLebby_// R.H.

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.