Where Saints Forfeit the Dawn

by Ellis Carrington

Heat 4 / 5 · 21+Novella · 12 chapters32,487 words2h 21m read~3h 37m listen

Before the College wakes, before the donors arrive with their ledgers and their loyalty oaths, a tenured professor kneels alone in the midnight observatory and scrubs blood from ritual linens she was never supposed to touch. The dome is stuck open. Sleet hisses through the ward-web. And in the warped brass of an old telescope, Saints’ reflection watches her from the dark.

He voted to strip her title. She has never forgiven him for it. But the Board of Saints has found both their signatures on the after-hours access log for the forbidden stacks, and the restricted containment folio those stacks were meant to protect is gone. By dawn, their fellowship funding dies with it — unless they stand before the Board as a united front, two enemies performing reconciliation for an audience of saints and donors who have never believed in either of them.

Sequestered together in the observatory beneath surveillance sigils etched into the stone, they rehearse their lies, hunt the missing folio through bone-white cloisters, and drag one another’s worst sins into the open air. Hollow Saints College is a place that turns scholars into weapons and calls it tradition. Caught knows exactly how that works. So does he.

Enemies To LoversDark RomantasySlow Burn