#captive romance

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.

Choke or Cry, Pick One

by Nadia Volkov

Three years ago, Iris Bell heard a child die through her own headset. She has not cried since.

Now her younger sister is missing, and the only contact is a man who calls at 11:47 every night and does not threaten her. He asks her questions. He hangs up at midnight. When he finally tells her where to come, Iris signs his contract because she has no other door left to open: thirty days in his canyon house, his rules, his ritual. Every night at the same hour she comes to his study, and every night he gives her one choice.

Kill Him Gently

by Nadia Volkov

The Brandt family has laundered the dirty money of half of Europe through Antwerp's diamond houses for forty years, and Daniil Brandt has spent his whole life being the knife his uncle points. So when a deal with the Calabrians dies in a back room with two men bleeding out on the floor, Daniil takes the negotiator the Contis sent as collateral, the way his uncle would. The way he always has.

Mattia Conti is supposed to be worth something. A son. A pressure point. A reason the Contis come to the table instead of to war. He is none of these things. He is the boy his father wrote out of the family years ago, sent to Antwerp precisely because losing him would cost nothing — and both men understand this within a week.

Fae and Fairytales

by Luna Blackwood

Dr. Saoirse Mac an Bhaird wrote the book on Fae bargains. Literally. Twenty years of academic work proving that the stories her grandmother whispered are folklore, not fact — that her mother wasn't taken, only lost. The monograph made her career. It also, apparently, made her required reading at the Hollow Court.

When her sister stumbles into a bargain at a Dublin gala, Saoirse invokes the substitution clause from her own footnotes and offers herself instead. Cael, Lord of the Hollow Court, accepts before she finishes the sentence. He has been waiting for her for forty years. He has read every paper she ever published. He knows exactly which loophole she just used — because he marked it in her own book.

Cum Factory

by Thea Blackwell

The Collapse killed male fertility, not men. The state's solution was the Donor Facilities — gleaming compounds where the country's last fertile men live out their days being collected three times a week by licensed technicians. The protesters who burned during the Riot Years called them cum factories. The name stuck.

Wren Aselin doesn't believe in the work. She believes in her paycheck, which keeps her twelve-year-old sister alive through a gene therapy the state will not subsidize. When she's transferred to Verdant Spring's A-tier facility and assigned to Donor 09 — the most genetically valuable man in the eastern grid, who has not completed a session in eleven months — she has six weeks to make him productive. If she fails, he is quietly euthanized. If he is euthanized, she loses her job. If she loses her job, her sister dies.

Blackthorn Keep

by Grace Wellington

They burned her grandmother for knowing which herbs stopped a fever. Wynne of Ashen has been waiting for her own noose since she was nine.

When a bishop's informer drags her to Ironholm Castle during the king's tournament season, she expects a pyre. Instead she is made the prize of the melee — offered to the knight who can unseat all comers and judge whether she is witch or woman.

The Nocturne Line

by Thea Blackwell

Ottilie Vasek boards a train that does not appear on any map.

Eight months after her husband's death — ruled a suicide she has never believed in — she follows a trail of rumors to a Central European platform at dusk, and hands her ticket to a conductor who looks at her as though he remembers a version of her face she has not worn yet. The Nocturne runs only at night. It carries only the passengers it chooses. And its conductor, Adrien Márton Kern, is something much older than the brass and velvet he moves through.