Beneath A Thousand Lanterns

At sixteen, Saerina al-Hakim has spent her life crossing the deserts of the Qamari Empire alongside her father's renowned merchant caravan. Clever, sharp-tongued, and gifted at reading people, she expects to continue the family trade, not become a prize in the Sultan's harem.

But when a chain of desperate lies and cruel misfortune places her before the empire's newly crowned Sultan, her future is no longer her own.

Determined to marry for love rather than fight for a ruler's attention, Saerina refuses to play the deadly game of palace politics. Instead, she allies herself with the Sultan's most favored consort, believing that loyalty and obscurity are her safest path to freedom.

She is wrong.

Behind gilded walls and silken veils, every smile conceals an ambition, every kindness carries a price, and every whispered secret can cost a life. The skills that once made Saerina an exceptional merchant prove dangerously inadequate against seasoned courtiers, ambitious consorts, and royal schemers who have spent their lives mastering deception.

And the greatest danger of all may be the Sultan himself.
Intelligent, calculating, and impossible to ignore, he is unlike the tyrant she expected. The more fiercely Saerina resists him, the more their fates become entwined, drawing her deeper into a court where survival demands more than honesty - it demands power.

In the palace where affection is a weapon and trust is the rarest currency, Saerina must decide how much of herself she is willing to sacrifice before the game consumes her entirely.