She carries seventeen stolen souls. The blind reader who could free them might destroy everything. Solenne Drake is the Keeper's daughter — precision-trained, architecturally perfect, and hollowed out since she was fourteen. She doesn't know the voices inside her magic belong to real people. She doesn't know her father has been feeding on students for eight hundred years. She doesn't know any of this until Noor Vasari arrives... moreShe carries seventeen stolen souls. The blind reader who could free them might destroy everything. Solenne Drake is the Keeper's daughter — precision-trained, architecturally perfect, and hollowed out since she was fourteen. She doesn't know the voices inside her magic belong to real people. She doesn't know her father has been feeding on students for eight hundred years. She doesn't know any of this until Noor Vasari arrives. Noor is a scholarship student, a blind reader, and the daughter of an expelled Archivist who no longer remembers her own name. She's come to the Athenaeum with her mother's encrypted journal, a suspicion that the institution devours its students, and no intention of being devoured. When their magic collides — gold light, impossible resonance, a frequency that shouldn't exist — they uncover the truth beneath the Athenaeum's foundations: hundreds of stolen essences stored in jars. A Binding Ceremony designed as invisible extraction. And a reversal that could free everyone — if Solenne is willing to lose everything she was built to be. But the reversal has a cost neither of them expected. And the Keeper is paying attention. Dual POV. Enemies to lovers. Dark academia with teeth. Maximum heat. Content includes: institutional abuse, power dynamics, explicit sapphic intimacy, morally complex choices. less
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