The Ember in Her Cloister

by Noel Everett

Heat 4 / 5 · 21+Novella · 12 chapters31,106 words2h 15m read~4h 22m listen

The midnight observatory of Hollow Saints College has stood for two centuries—bone-white cloisters, a dome that won’t quite close, and a healing ward-web that should never have cracked. But crack it did, and now the Board of Saints has decided exactly who will pay.

Saints Marrow, disgraced House Veil professor, arrives under summons to find the ruined ward bleeding sleet and a damning iron-sealed folio slip half-frozen in a puddle—her initials beside his. Bram Sloan, House Ember’s sharpest tongue and her oldest wound, is already waiting under guard, fury barely contained behind every cutting word. The Board’s writ is simple and merciless: restore the ward before the eclipse, recover the missing folio, or forfeit everything. Together. Bound by a surveillance quill that records their every breath.

Night after night in the haunted observatory, chalk-dusted arguments give way to something far more dangerous. The forbidden stacks whisper of engineered collapses and vanished texts, and the ruin around them begins to look less like an accident and more like a design. Someone wanted them here. Someone needed them desperate.

Enemies To LoversDark RomantasySlow Burn