Summary

Lewellyn Sylverstein was not born. She was forged. Silver hair, icy blue eyes, and a heart that never learned how to beat for anyone else. The only daughter of the Duke of Sylverstein, she was raised on one rule: _WE TAKE._ Beautiful. Brilliant. Cruel beyond redemption. The kind of woman who ruins a man with a smile and calls it mercy. Mathew is nothing. A nameless clerk from the Aspergillus Merchant Guild, with ink-stained hands, brown unruly hair, and strange silver eyes that see too much. Empathetic to a fault. Kind in a world that punishes kindness. He was supposed to deliver a ledger and leave. He made the mistake of not looking away. Now Lewellyn has a new obsession. She doesn't want to marry him. She doesn't want to love him. She wants to _own_ him. To break him, to unravel him, to see if his empathy can survive her cruelty. But Mathew looks at her like she's still human. And for the first time in her cold-blooded life, Lewellyn doesn't know what to do with something she can't calculate. *A slow-paced, angsty, revolutionising dark romance set in 1814 England. Enemies to obsessed. She is the villain. He is the only man who won't run.* He fell first. She will fall harder. And when she does, she will burn the whole kingdom down to keep him.

Genre: Romance,Fantasy

Author: Sleepyhead

Status: 1d ago

Chapters: 2

Rating: n/a

Age Rating: 18+

Prelude

There is a particular kind of cruelty that is not taught. It is bred.

For four hundred years, the Dukes of Sylverstein did not rule Northumberland. They _owned_ it. They owned the cliffs, the mines beneath them, the villages that worked the mines, and the vicars who prayed for the men who died in them. Their motto, carved above the great hearth atSylverstein Hall, was not in Latin, but in plain English:

_WE TAKE._

Lewellyn Sylverstein was born into that motto like other girls are born into lace.

She was not beautiful in any way that was soft. Her hair was not blonde, not hite, but true silver, like spun wire even as a child - unnatural, arresting. It fell to her waist, straight and heavy. Her eyes were a pale, glacial blue, the kind of blue that made people look away first. When she was twelve, she had her governess dismissed by planting a stolen ruby in her trunk and then weeping prettily while the woman was dragged out. When she was sixteen, she had a suitor's business ruined because he had laughed at her brother's stutter. She did not forgive. She did not forget. She catalogued.

Her family called it intelligence. The servants called it something else, in wispers.

She called it clarity.