Nightshade: Sorrowsong University Book 1

Some poisons are slow-acting — and the most dangerous one at Sorrowsong University has a name: Cael Voss.

When scholarship student Mara Ashwick arrives at Sorrowsong's ivy-choked gates, she carries two things: a desperate need to prove herself and a list of enemies. Cael sits at the top of it. Arrogant, untouchable, and the sole reason her sister never graduated, he rules the university's elite inner circle like it was built for him — because it was.

Mara came here for answers. He makes sure she finds nothing but dead ends.

But Sorrowsong has its own rules, and when a centuries-old curse begins picking off students one by one, Mara and Cael are bound together by the one thing neither of them can afford: trust. Working side by side in the university's forbidden archives, she starts to see the cracks beneath his cruelty — the grief he weaponizes, the secrets he guards like open wounds.

He sees her too. Worse, he *wants* her.

Their hatred is familiar, comfortable, safe. Whatever is growing between them in the dark stacks of Sorrowsong's library is none of those things.

The curse demands a sacrifice before the semester ends. Mara is starting to suspect she already knows what she'll lose — and it isn't her life.

*It's her heart.*