An Oath of Dust and Velvet

by Cora Brooks

Heat 3 / 5Novella · 12 chapters33,092 words2h 24m read~3h 41m listen

Saskia Ellery has bled for her chair at Hollow Saints College — three years of perfect marks, careful silence, and a testimony she has never stopped regretting. When a bone-white pillowcase appears in the cloister laundry before dawn, seared with a scorch sigil and clinging to a slip from the restricted folio catalogue, she knows the past is already unraveling. By nightfall, the Board of Saints has bound her under a joint disciplinary writ with the one person she can never outrun: Tristan Brier, the icy House Ember prodigy whose career her words helped destroy.

Forced into the fog-damp corridors and forbidden stacks of Hollow Saints, Saskia and Tristan must locate a missing containment folio before it triggers a catastrophe neither of them can survive — professionally or otherwise. Every clandestine strategy session in the steam-heavy laundry, every breathless experiment beneath the midnight observatory’s turning dome, pulls them closer to the College’s darkest secrets and to each other with an intensity that threatens to consume everything they have fought to reclaim.

The deeper they dig, the clearer it becomes: the missing folio is not merely stolen. It is the keystone of decades of Board-sanctioned lies, and Saskia’s own testimony was one of them.

Enemies To LoversDark RomantasySlow BurnForbidden LoveMorally Grey