Marry the Monster Duke

The debts are read aloud in a damp morning room, and Wren Halloran, mender of hems, reader of seams, expert at making ruined things look intentional, learns his price. Thirty-one thousand crowns against his stepfather's name. The Crown's settlement: a marriage.

The bridegroom they choose for him is the Monster Duke.

Sylvan Mordane, Duke of Carrowmoor, has not appeared at court in nine years. The north says plague lives in his tower. The court says scars. The whispers say both. He marries by proxy, sends for his consort through the autumn passes, and greets his bride with a single rule: do not touch me.

Wren expected a monster. He found a household holding its breath: a housekeeper with keys and opinions, a boy who counts straight nails, a priest who bleeds the duke every season and writes the results in a grey book nobody is meant to read. He found a husband who will not lie to him, will not touch him, and will not say why the east range is sealed, or why fresh wax keeps appearing on a chapel lock, or who in Corvale still pays a dead physician twenty crowns a month to call a healthy man contagious.

But Wren was raised on ledgers. He knows what it means when accounts refuse to match, and the accounts in this marriage refuse. The waybills run fourteen bolts while the chests hold twelve. The wedding letter arrives with its wax broken. The cloth in his bride-gift chests carries a chalk mark from a plague store that burned nine years ago.

Someone is still running the quarantine that made a duke into a monster. And the surest way to kill a man in this realm is not a knife. It is a certificate, signed by the right physician, dated after his death.

So Wren does what a shopkeeper does when the ledger lies. He counts. He keeps the receipts. He lays his traps in thread and wax and stolen books, and he prices what the court refuses to: a husband's nine years of bleeding, a village's nine years of chalk, and the true cost of the crown's oldest unpaid debt.

He has one year and a day of marriage, a needle case, and hands the court forgot to fear. His husband wants him safe, ignorant, and at arm's length. The Crown wants the north quiet. The Chancery wants the duke certified before the frost.

Wren wants the truth, his husband's bare hand, and every last crown of it paid in full.

Marry the Monster Duke is a gothic fantasy M/M romance of a marriage arranged before love and concluded long after it: fake vows growing true, gloves that come off only in chapels, a plague that never was, and a court where the deadliest weapon on the table is a pen. For readers who want slow-burn devotion, tender and competent heroics, bookkeeping as a martial art, and a monster who turns out to be a man who has been mending himself alone in a tower for nine years.

The wedding was real. The marriage is a contract. The year is running.

Hold still. The mend is the strong part.