THE UNSIGNED YEARS

Sidonie Brancu keeps the books for a principality that has none. Rents, arrears, the schedule of encumbrances, and one inventory the housekeeper enters every Monday morning: twelve pairs of silk shoes, destroyed. Soles gone. Seams open. Blood in three pairs. It has been one hundred and fifty-one weeks.

It was never a mystery. It is a receipt.

She found the stair when she was twenty-three, three weeks after her father sold her sister’s future for a bridge concession — and she did not stumble onto it. She went looking, because the estate was out of things to sell that were not daughters. Four nights of negotiation. Three concessions won. One signature, hers alone, on behalf of twelve.

Before the state sends anyone to look into it, there are three years of this: eleven sisters who never voted and are not entirely grateful; a second sister who has been in love for a year and cannot marry while the bargain holds; a shoemaker in the lower town who has made twelve pairs a week for three years and has never once asked why; a Host below who is warm and funny and has never in three years told her a single lie; and a youngest sister of eighteen writing secretly to the medical faculties in Vienna, on the strength of an older sister’s promise that nothing signed above ground will ever bind.

Then a man arrives from the Chancellery with a grey coat that makes him impossible to notice, and nobody tells him what it charges to wear.

He follows her down on his third night. She finds him within a day, because a broken silver branch is not evidence, it is a transaction, and transactions have counterparties. And instead of destroying him she offers him a better deal than his orders — because he is the first person in three years who has looked at the problem instead of at her. He is also the first person to read her contract properly, and to ask why she chose the phrase held in abeyance when anyone else alive would have written void.

She has spent three years deciding for eleven people and calling it love. He has spent his whole life being wanted for what he can do, and is now spending himself down a street name and a face at a time. The coat takes small things first.

Dark fantasy romance in a bankrupt Carpathian principality in 1913, where the war is eighteen months out and nobody in the book can feel it yet. The kind of book where the most thrilling scene is a woman reading a document aloud in a room full of creditors.

WHY THIS WILL SELL

→ Fantasy > Fairy Tales & Folklore carries an 11.4 sales-to-comp (Hot Niche) — the strongest ratio in the genre, only 3,050 competing titles

→ Romance > Fantasy at 8.9 (Hot Mainstream) with 288 daily sales per top 20 title — the volume category the folklore ranking feeds into

→ A top-tier Grimm property with no adult romance competition — every existing treatment is YA-shelved and closed door

→ The source supplies the romance engine natively — investigator sent to expose her, recruited by her instead; no imported conflict

→ 1913 Carpathia does dread for free — the reader supplies the war and the book never has to be about it

→ The climax is won by contract analysis, not combat — a one-line pitch that travels, in a category where everything resolves the same way

TROPES:
• Contract Bargain
• Deliberate Heroine
• Investigator and Subject
• Forced Complicity
• Slow Burn
• Only She Can See Him
• The Villain Who Never Lies
• Twelve Sisters, None of Whom Were Asked
• She Is the Only Record of Him
• Competence as Foreplay

HEAT LEVEL: Open Door / High Spice 

Perfect for fans of: Naomi Novik, Holly Black, Erin A. Craig, and Hannah Whitten