Description: She was the price of peace. Now, she is the architect of war.
Princess Hannah of Oakhaven has a mind made for calculus and a heart hardened by iron. For years, she has watched her landlocked kingdom wither under a brutal blockade, her people starving while the mines run dry. When her father, King Jacob, announces he has brokered a treaty to lift the siege, Hannah is relieved-until she learns the cost.
Her.
Sold into an arranged marriage with the enemy to secure trade routes, Hannah is stripped of her title and dragged aboard The Liberty, the flagship of the world's most feared pirate lord.
Caleb is a Wolf of the Violet Seas. Ruthless, charismatic, and bound by a code that baffles the royal court, he doesn't want a wife. He wants a hostage to ensure the King's compliance. But the woman he drags onto his deck isn't the pampered royal he expected. She is an engineer who speaks the language of structural integrity, who rigs pulleys in a storm, and who looks at his ship not as a prison, but as a machine to be optimized.
Trapped in the middle of the ocean, the line between hate and desire begins to blur. Caleb chains her to his side, but Hannah is already calculating the breaking point. Yet, as she digs into the ship's logs and deciphers the truth behind the blockade, she unearths a secret more devastating than the famine itself.
The King isn't the victim. The pirates aren't the monsters. And the grain her people are dying for isn't at the bottom of the sea-it's rotting beneath her father's throne.
With an assassin on her heels and a war fleet on the horizon, Hannah must make a choice: cling to the safety of her lineage, or forge a new alliance with the man who stole her freedom.
They wanted a Princess. They are about to get a Revolution.
THE HOLLOW CITADEL is a high-stakes, adult fantasy romance perfect for fans of The Bridge Kingdom and A Court of Thorns and Roses. If you like heroines who use physics to crush their enemies, morally grey pirate captains with a soft spot for refugees, and a slow-burn romance that explodes into fire, this book is for you.
TROPES & THEMES:
Enemies to Lovers (With high stakes)
Arranged Marriage (Sold to the Pirate King)
Forced Proximity (Handcuffed together!)
"There is Only One Bed" (And a hammock)
"Who Did This To You?" (Protective MMC)
Competence Porn (STEM/Engineering Heroine)
Found Family (The Pirate Crew)
Slow Burn with High Heat Payoff
Dagger in the Garter / Ballroom Battle
Touch Her and Die