rawr_is_me
The Citadel was never built to be a school.
It was built to keep the peace.
High in the mountains where the provinces of Monroe collide, Saint Jude's Academy of the Marches houses the heirs of the empire's most powerful dynasties beneath a single roof.
Future rulers.
Future generals.
Children whose surnames can move armies and plunge entire regions into darkness.
Officially, they are students.
In reality, they are hostages.
If one House breaks the treaty, its children are the first to pay the price. It forces every patriarch and matriarch to answer a single, devastating question: Would you risk your own blood?
Claudine Zheng-Greaves knows how to survive Saint Jude's. Keep your head down. Follow the rules. Never give anyone leverage. Especially not Theodore Blake-the cold, calculating heir to North Monroe's defense empire and the last person she should trust.
Yet from the moment they meet, something feels off.
A look held a second too long.
A sense of recognition that shouldn't exist.
Questions neither of them know how to ask.
As tensions rise between the Signatory Houses, strange fractures begin appearing beneath Monroe's carefully engineered stability. Alliances shift. Secrets vanish.
Powerful people start moving in the shadows.
And somewhere within the machinery that holds the empire together, something is waking up.
Because peace is not the natural state of Monroe.
It is something that was built.
Maintained.
Enforced.
And if it starts to break, everyone inside the Citadel will discover exactly what it was designed to contain.
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A dark academic science-fantasy filled with political intrigue, aristocratic rivalries, forbidden truths, slow-burn romance, and an empire held together by secrets.
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