Raven MonroeI think I always knew I was going to die young. Like I had this… silent, invisible clock ticking down to my final moments plastered above my head. Maybe that’s why I was so reckless, crazy. Why I sought after adventure. Why nothing scared me… Except, there was always this… feeling I couldn’t shake that something was in the darkest parts of every corner, under every bed, closet, or room, like a ghost watching me. Waiting to take me. My own, personal reaper.But it was always only during a lightning storm that I could see the outline of my reaper. No scythe. Just a tall, faceless shadow in a hood, staring at me in the dark…That was the thing though. It was never the storm itself that scared me. Never the loud booming of thunder. Never the howling wind or the way the windows rattled. Never the sound of rain pounding against said windows. It was just that goddamn lightning.Seems fitting, I suppose, that I’d die before my twentieth birthday during a freak lightning storm of the century… I just always thought I’d die while doing something dangerous - F*ck it. I’d even take a boring death like simply dying in my sleep from a brain aneurysm or even an early onset heart attack.Anything.I’d take any other way other than this...

Elspeth needs a monster. The monster might be her. Elspeth Spindle needs more than luck to stay safe in the eerie, mist-locked kingdom of Blunder—she needs a monster. She calls him the Nightmare, an ancient, mercurial spirit trapped in her head. He protects her. He keeps her secrets. But nothing comes for free, especially magic. When Elspeth meets a mysterious highwayman on the forest road, her life takes a drastic turn. Thrust into a world of shadow and deception, she joins a dangerous quest to cure Blunder from the dark magic infecting it. And the highwayman? He just so happens to be the King’s nephew, Captain of the most dangerous men in Blunder…and guilty of high treason. Together they must gather twelve Providence Cards—the keys to the cure. But as the stakes heighten and their undeniable attraction intensifies, Elspeth is forced to face her darkest secret yet: the Nightmare is slowly taking over her mind. And she might not be able to stop him.

Before he discovered my age, he uncovered my heart. Bruised and abused, and victim to a loveless household, I shimmered with new life the moment he found me drowning my sorrows in a lake beneath the stars. A chance encounter. An unspoken connection. I was smitten; he was curious. But, as everyone knew, fate could be decidedly cruel. He called me Halley, like the comet. I called him Reed. And my best friend? Well…she called him Dad. Older is a forbidden, slow-burn, age-gap romance standalone, ending in an HEA.