Tropes:

• Morally Grey MMC
• Forbidden Love
• Trails to the Death
• Not a Traditional HEA
• Dystopian

Summary:

You have until twenty-eight to be chosen. Marry or die.

In the Covenant States, marriage isn't a choice. It's a countdown. Every woman is watched, ranked, and evaluated until a man selects her or her time runs out. Maryn Veil has always known the rules. She just never expected to be chosen by him.

When Elias Hale, the president's son and the most powerful bachelor in the nation, selects her for his Rite of Unity, Maryn finds herself in a world of televised trials, formal balls, and twelve women competing for the same future. The prize is safety. The cost is everything she thought she was.

Elias is not what she expected. Thoughtful, genuine, and desperate to be better than his father, he's the kind of man she could almost believe in. But someone else is watching from the shadows, and he sees Maryn far more clearly than she's comfortable with.

As the trials tighten and the stakes become impossible to ignore, Maryn begins to understand that surviving the rite and surviving the Covenant are not the same thing. In a system built on compliance, the most dangerous thing she can do is feel anything at all.