Vows Beneath Black Water

When Isolde Vale is forced into an arranged marriage to save her disgraced family, she expects a cold alliance with Lucien D’Arcy—the reclusive heir to a shipping empire whispered about in courts, tabloids, and church pews alike. Instead, she is delivered to Blackwater House, a storm-lashed estate built over drowned catacombs, where doors lock from the outside, servants speak in half-truths, and her new husband wears cruelty like armor. Lucien is dangerous, obsessive, and impossible to read—especially when he seems to know secrets Isolde has never spoken aloud.

As their brutal marriage becomes a war of seduction, control, and reluctant hunger, Isolde uncovers the truth behind the D’Arcy fortune: smuggling, blood debts, a vanished first bride, and a hidden identity that ties Lucien to the night her mother died. But the deeper she digs, the more her hatred tangles with desire. Someone in Blackwater House wants her silent. Someone else wants Lucien ruined. And when Isolde realizes she was never chosen as a bride but as leverage in an old vendetta, she must decide whether to destroy the man who deceived her—or become the darkness at his side.