Hollow Saints

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The Professor of Forbidden Stars

When a nor’easter locks down Hollow Saints College and the midnight observatory’s brass dome jams open to the howling Atlantic sky, compliance professor Persephone Nash finds something that should not exist: a single cream vellum page pinned beneath a tripod, its star-script rewriting itself in the rain. By the time the Board of Saints summons her into an emergency scrying, a restricted folio has vanished from the forbidden stacks—and ward-signatures place only two people in those bone-white halls after hours. Her. And the House Veil ethics investigator who arrived that very evening, sharp-eyed and principled and far too easy to hate. Oberon Whitaker is everything Persephone has learned not to trust: loyal to the institution that made her its midnight warden, fluent in the language of accountability, and watching her with eyes that miss nothing. The Board wants a culprit before dawn. The archive—sentient, hungry, and bleeding forbidden knowledge through every cracked ward—wants something older and stranger. And the folio, wherever it hides in the labyrinthine stacks, seems to answer only to spoken truth. Forced into an uneasy partnership through shifting shelves and storm-lashed cloisters, Persephone and Oberon circle each other with equal measures of suspicion and an attraction neither can afford. Every secret she guards is a wall. Every step he takes is a debt to the Board. But the archive does not negotiate with silence, and the vellum page in Persephone’s hand maps corridors that do not appear in any sanctioned plan—corridors that seem to lead somewhere neither of them can reach alone. To save the college, she must trust the one person whose loyalty could be turned against her. The question is whether, when dawn finally breaks over Hollow Saints, either of them will still be willing to pay the price.