Journee

In a city that runs on blood and loyalty, Journee Taylor has spent nineteen years perfecting the art of being impossible-loud enough to be heard, sharp enough to cut, chaotic enough that no one thinks to look too close. But when her parents are murdered and the alliance her dead father promised becomes the only thing keeping two families from war, she learns that being impossible doesn't mean being free.

Kareem Al-Hassan buried his entire bloodline on a day he should have died beside them. Now he runs an empire built by ghosts, held together by a handshake he never made and a woman he never chose. The engagement to Journee was arranged between fathers who didn't live to see it through-but the chains don't care who forged them. Only who wears them.

A marriage born from massacre and obligation leaves no room for grief, let alone want. Yet every screaming match, every reluctant glance, every moment she refuses to fear him and he refuses to need her threatens to collapse the walls they've both built from the wreckage of their families.

In a world where the dead make the rules and the living just pay the price, neither the girl who burns too bright nor the man who's gone too quiet will survive unchanged-if they survive at all.