Bookspry

He watched her for a year before she ever felt his eyes.

Lark Avari came to Blackthorn College to disappear into dead poets and outlive her mother's diagnosis. A scholarship she never applied for. A graduate seminar she didn't choose. A rare-books desk, quietly reassigned, in the private archive of the one professor the whole campus warns her about.

Roman Voss is the Voss Chair of English Literature, sole heir to the endowment that owns half of Hollowbrook — and the Sovereign of a two-hu...
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He watched her for a year before she ever felt his eyes.

Lark Avari came to Blackthorn College to disappear into dead poets and outlive her mother's diagnosis. A scholarship she never applied for. A graduate seminar she didn't choose. A rare-books desk, quietly reassigned, in the private archive of the one professor the whole campus warns her about.

Roman Voss is the Voss Chair of English Literature, sole heir to the endowment that owns half of Hollowbrook — and the Sovereign of a two-hundred-year-old society that meets in the crypt beneath a deconsecrated chapel. He already knew her name. He underwrote her future. He has read every book she has ever read, twice. In a granite town where the fog never lifts and three old families own everything, the man watching her from the thirteenth floor of the library is the only one who sees her at all.

She knows what a man looks like when he wants to own her. She has survived one before. She should run.

She stops running first.

But the Order never gives without taking. When her mother dies precisely on the Order's schedule, the only door out of Lark's grief is the one Roman holds — and the toll for walking through it is a vow signed in a crypt, under a new moon, in blood.

He offered her the gate. She chose the thorns.

✦ Stalker romance ✦ Dark academia ✦ Morally grey antihero ✦ Secret society & forbidden rituals ✦ Professor / student, nine-year age gap ✦ Coerced vow / captive dynamics ✦ Obsessive, possessive hero ✦ Dual POV, present tense ✦ Gothic Vermont winter ✦ Slow-burn descent

Black Ivy is Book One of The Blackthorn Trilogy — one couple, one continuous descent, escalating across three books.
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