DivineDB

Horny and Home Alone

by Willow Pierce

Frankie Russo has never once in her life had a room to herself. One of five kids, then dorms, then a four-girl apartment — twenty-one years and not a single hour of guaranteed privacy. So when the lease lines up and everyone scatters for the summer, she gets ten weeks alone in the apartment, and she has a plan. A list, actually. In her Notes app. She is going to find out, finally, with the lights on, what she actually likes.

Three days into the best summer of her life, the front door opens.

Carrier Wave

by Eve Lockhart

For eight years Yara Osei has kept Beacon Theta-9 alone, at the dark edge of the Cassel Reach shipping lane, where the radio runs quiet enough to hear a thing no one else believes is there — a faint pulse coming out of the black on a forty-day cycle. She took the loneliest posting in the lane on purpose. She is answerable to no one here, and she has made herself unbearable enough to keep it that way.

Then a freight pilot gets rerouted past her beacon. Caleb Mercer passes once every forty days, and for eighteen minutes — line of sight, no delay — his is the only human voice she gets. He listens. He adjusts. He starts counting the days between windows instead of the days left on his expiring license. So does she, though she would log a fault before she admitted it.

Cold Iron and Water

by Seraphina Crow

Rhona Tait gentles horses. She has never once mastered an animal by force, and her father always swore she never would need to — patience, he said, will break anything that can be broken, and break it kind. Then her father dies, the laird's factor gives her until the spring term to quit the croft a widow has no right to hold, and the thing in Carr Loch takes its third man of the glen.

A water horse cannot be killed with anything the glen owns. But the old wisdom says it can be caught: an iron bridle thrown over its head, and it must serve the hand that holds the rein — plough and haul and harm no one — until the day it works the iron loose again, and drowns whoever kept it. So Rhona goes down to the black water at the turning of the tide and does the one thing she swore she never would.

Restitution

by Margot Ellery

For twenty-three years, Dr. Eleanor Crewe has kept a locked drawer and the discipline never to open it.

She has spent her life at St. Anselm's College studying the medieval art of confession — the manuals that taught the guilty how to account for themselves — and has never once made an account of her own. The winter she was twenty-eight, a frightened young researcher came to her rooms with proof that the college's most celebrated treasure was a forgery, and asked her to keep it safe. She told him to wait. He was never seen again.

Run the Table

by Roxy Vale

For fifteen years, Adele Marchetti ran the Dry River Motorcycle Club. She kept its books, planned its runs, and called every shot that mattered — while her father wore the president's patch and took the credit at the head of the table. Now Sticks Marchetti is three weeks in the ground, the club is leaderless, and the Phoenix mother charter is sending a man down the highway to swallow Dry River whole.

The bylaws are clear: a woman cannot hold the gavel. So Dell does the next best thing. She finds Wyatt Calder — a respected patch from a folded charter, a man with no faction, no allies, and nothing to hold over her — and she rigs the vote that makes him president. He wears the patch. She makes the calls. Nobody at church can ever know.

The Advent Letters

by Noelle Frost

For twenty-four years, someone has left a handwritten letter on a different doorstep in Hartley, Vermont, every night of December. No one knows who. The whole town has built its holidays around the wondering.

Tess Holloway came back to bury her mother, price the house, and be gone before the first snow. She did not plan to climb into the attic and find the carbon copies — twenty-four Decembers of them, every letter, in handwriting she would know anywhere. Her mother. Her cold, unreachable mother, who could write a town into feeling loved and never once managed to write to her own daughter.

Talk Me Down

by Willow Pierce

Jocelyn Ramos is very good at being the calm voice in the dark. Three nights a week she works the Calder Nightline, the campus line you call at 2 a.m. when you can't say the thing out loud to anyone who knows your face. The rules are simple: no names, no faces, and if you ever recognize a caller, you hand the call to someone else.

Then a caller who calls himself Gray starts finding her shifts. Week after week, parking-garage confessions, the dad he's failing, the life everyone picked for him before he was old enough to argue. Joss isn't supposed to wait for his calls. She waits for his calls.

Running Iron

by Cassidy Rhodes

Della Voss spent twenty years building a cattle operation in Carter County. She spent one bad winter losing it. Now she draws a state paycheck as the county brand inspector — checking other people's herds, signing other people's bills of sale, pretending the job doesn't taste like everything she failed at.

Then the cattle start disappearing. A few head here, a stock trailer's worth there, brands altered by someone who knows exactly how it's done. The county wants it pinned on Wade Macklin, the outsider who bought the old Pruitt place and never learned to say much. Della has the authority to do it. She's also looked at the evidence long enough to know it's wrong — and to see where it really points, toward a name nobody in Carter County wants to say out loud.

Long to Reign

by Adriana Castille

Queen Cosima II never expected the crown. She was the second child, raised to be charming and photographed and married off well — until an illness took her brother and left her reigning over a country she was never taught to rule. Six years on, she has held the small kingdom of Soreil together by being very good at standing still.

Then Parliament calls a referendum. In eight weeks, the people of Soreil will vote on whether the monarchy should exist at all. And the man leading the campaign to abolish her — to end seven hundred years of her family in a single afternoon at the ballot box — is the only person in the country who has ever spoken to her as an equal.

Corpse Bread

by Seraphina Crow

For twenty-two years Annis Cobbe has eaten the sins of the dead. A coin, a loaf laid on the cold chest of the departed, and she takes their wrongs into herself so their souls go up clean. The valley of Carrow Wend needs her and will not sit at her table. She is its necessary monster, and she has made a life of it.

Then, at a graveside, she sees the other one. The Long Guest. The thing the village made its first bargain with a hundred years ago and has been cheating ever since — one soul owed each generation, and the sin-eater's rite invented to keep from paying. He has watched his tithe walk the lanes inside a living woman for a century. This generation is nearly spent. The debt has come due, and he has come up out of the dark to be courteous about it.

Provisioned for One

by Eve Lockhart

Renn Ferreira flies alone. Eleven months out, eleven months back, one set of rations, one bunk, one signature on the manifest — that is the entire point. After what a captain's lie cost her six years ago, she built a life where no one else's name could ever sit beside hers.

Three weeks into the longest haul of her career, a mass alert flags a crate that should not exist. Inside it: a cryopod with a dying power cell, and a living man her ship was never provisioned to carry. Waking him spends air meant for one person across two. Leaving him asleep lets him quietly stop breathing in the dark.

Omega Off Record

by Nadia Volkov

Iris Voss's name is on every mating bond in the city. As Director of Records at Castellan House, she countersigns each contract, files it in the vault, makes it real. She is the most trusted registrar the firm has ever had — precise, unbonded, married to the work. The firm believes she has no bond of her own.

The firm is wrong.

Say No to Me

by Violet Sinclair

Greer Mahon has built a career, and a self, on the word no. For twenty years she has been the most feared eye in Chicago — the art authenticator collectors hire when they need someone who cannot be flattered, cannot be hurried, and will not sign her name to a beautiful lie. Then she refuses to authenticate a painting the whole city wants to be real, and the whole city decides it is finished with her.

When a rival tells her that her no has stopped being judgment and curdled into reflex — that she would reject anything, anyone, simply to feel certain — Greer does the only thing a woman like her can do with an accusation. She designs an experiment to disprove it. For the twenty-eight days of February she will say yes. To every invitation, every request, every dare. At the end of the month she will switch her judgment back on and prove it was never broken.

Good Girls Finish Last

by Scarlett Quinn

Three times Iris Vance has sat the Master Sommelier exam. Three times she's been flawless. Three times she's failed by a hair — and the examiner on the other side of the tasting table has watched her do it every time.

August Roe doesn't tell candidates why they fail. He tells Iris anyway. She doesn't taste the wine, he says — she performs it. She gives the room the answer it wants instead of the one in her own mouth. He's right, and she hates him for it, and she hates more that it isn't only true of wine. It's true of every bed she's ever been in. True of the polite, useful, perfectly behaved woman she built so that someone, anyone, would love her without being asked twice.

Unscented

by Nadia Volkov

In the city of Vael, an omega is worth what her scent will fetch. They are graded like grain, priced like silver, and sold to the alphas who can afford them. Mira Voss cannot be graded. She was born without a scent of any kind — a ghost, the Registry calls her, an omega no nose can find, no alpha can claim, no ledger can price. For thirty-four years that has been her shame. It has also, quietly, been her weapon.

From a clerk's desk in the Registry's lower archive, Mira has spent eleven years forging the papers that steal doomed omegas out of the city — and no one has ever caught her, because no one can follow a woman who leaves no trace. Then a child's name appears on the remission list, an auditor is sent down into her archive, and three alphas walk into her careful, invisible life. The inspector trained to read every lie a body tells, who finds in her a silence he cannot translate. The clockmender who lost his own sense of smell, and to whom her blankness is no flaw at all. The smuggler who has worked beside her for years without a face, and who has never once wanted something he could not track.

Pretty Little Reaper

by Scarlett Quinn

Wren Marlow is the youngest reaper in her bloodline, and her first solo collection is a name she already knows by heart. Cassian Vael. Four hundred and thirty-seven years old. Eleven reapers before her. Including her older sister, who walked into his Upper East Side townhouse at twenty-two and never came out.

Wren is not going to fall. She has a folding blade in her bag, a grudge a decade in the making, and exactly zero interest in whatever charm killed every Marlow woman before her. She's going to do the job, drag her sister's name out of the Bureau's compromised file, and go home.

Welcome to OmegaLand

by Nadia Volkov

Three years into her contract at OmegaLand — the world's most exclusive omega wellness resort — Vesna has learned the rules. Smile in the brochures. Hit her heat schedule. Don't ask what happens in the suites with the soundproofed doors. The pay clears her sister's debts. The pastel uniforms hide the bruises. The system works, as long as she does.

Then Adrian Roth arrives. The founder's son. The heir. The man whose face is on the wall of every staff lounge, smiling with corporate confidence beside the words BUILDING THE FUTURE OF OMEGA WELLNESS. He has come for a site review. He has come, his father insists, to learn the business. He has not come for her.