Marriage in the Work is never a choice. Vincent Hale gives Mari one anyway.
Twenty-one-year-old Mari Lloyd has always known Council would choose her husband. She never expected to be assigned to Vincent Hale—the young First Hand whose forbidden questions about Ava Moore’s murder once drew them together, and who knows her complicated history with Alden Warrick.
Vincent can kill on command, hide a body, and endure anything his Steward demands. Marriage frightens him more than any of it. When Mari’s photograph appears in his first-wife file, he knows the match makes no sense.
But before he accepts it, he asks Mari what she wants.
She chooses him.
Now they must learn to trust one another inside a marriage created by a system that has never respected either of their choices. Alden pretends the match means nothing to him. Mari is still seeing ghosts. And Vincent is beginning to see them too.
Then a murdered girl is left inside the Community—again, staged with details from a case the Work buried several years ago.
Can Mari and Vincent turn an assigned marriage into something they truly choose? And can they trust each other long enough to uncover what the dead are trying to show them before the Work buries another murder?
First Wife is a dark psychological cult thriller and supernatural horror novel featuring religious trauma, coercive control, ghosts, an unsolved murder, secret assassins, institutional corruption, and a dangerous obsession. Begin the story in Book 1 of The Numbered:Wash Away My Sinand return to the dark world of As For Me And My House.
Genre: Romantic Suspense
Twenty-one-year-old Mari Lloyd has always known Council would choose her husband. She never expected to be assigned to Vincent Hale—the young First Hand whose forbidden questions about Ava Moore’s murder once drew them together, and who knows her complicated history with Alden Warrick.
Vincent can kill on command, hide a body, and endure anything his Steward demands. Marriage frightens him more than any of it. When Mari’s photograph appears in his first-wife file, he knows the match makes no sense.
But before he accepts it, he asks Mari what she wants.
She chooses him.
Now they must learn to trust one another inside a marriage created by a system that has never respected either of their choices. Alden pretends the match means nothing to him. Mari is still seeing ghosts. And Vincent is beginning to see them too.
Then a murdered girl is left inside the Community—again, staged with details from a case the Work buried several years ago.
Can Mari and Vincent turn an assigned marriage into something they truly choose? And can they trust each other long enough to uncover what the dead are trying to show them before the Work buries another murder?
First Wife is a dark psychological cult thriller and supernatural horror novel featuring religious trauma, coercive control, ghosts, an unsolved murder, secret assassins, institutional corruption, and a dangerous obsession. Begin the story in Book 1 of The Numbered:Wash Away My Sinand return to the dark world of As For Me And My House.
Genre: Romantic Suspense
Used availability for April Boulware's First Wife