Novels by Alina Norcrest

The Thorn dining room had never looked less like itself, stripped of its usual quiet formality and dressed instead for a performance, white orchids crowding every surface, candlelight arranged to flatter rather than illuminate, silver polished until it threw back distorted reflections of every guest who passed it.Nyra stood near the staircase in the navy dress Camille had recommended, hands cold despite the warmth of the room, watching the front door the way a person watches a door they are afraid to walk through and equally afraid not to."You look pale," Camille murmured beside her, not unkindly, adjusting the strap of Nyra's dress with brisk, efficient hands. "Pinch your cheeks or something. You're about to meet your fiancé looking like you've seen a ghost."Nyra almost laughed, the sound catching somewhere in her throat before it could fully form. If Camille only knew how close to accurate that observation actually was.The Ashford party arrived at exactly eight o'clock, not a mi

Camille found out before Nyra had even finished unpacking the announcement in her own head, which was how Nyra knew the news had already traveled through the house like smoke under a door."You're joking." Camille stood in the doorway of Nyra's room without knocking, arms crossed, her expression somewhere between disbelief and offense, as though Nyra had stolen something rather than been handed it against her will. "Zayden Ashford. The Zayden Ashford. And they're giving him you.""I didn't ask for this," Nyra said quietly, folding a sweater she did not need to fold, giving her hands something to do that wasn't shaking."Nobody's saying you asked for it." Odette appeared behind her sister in the doorway, taller, sharper, always the one who spoke last and cut deepest when she finally did. "We're saying it doesn't make sense. Men like that don't marry girls like you. They marry girls who know how to be looked at."Nyra had spent enough years in this house to know that Odette's comments w

Zayden Ashford had read his grandfather's will eleven times since the funeral, and on the twelfth reading, sitting alone in his office on the fortieth floor with the city spread out gold and indifferent beneath him, he still could not find a way out of it."There isn't a loophole," said Harold Finch, the Ashford family's longtime legal counsel, standing on the other side of the desk with the posture of a man who had delivered bad news to this particular family for thirty years and had learned not to flinch while doing it. "I've had three separate teams look at it. Your grandfather was many things, but sloppiness with language was never one of them."Zayden did not look up from the document. "He wants me married to a stranger in thirty days or he hands my own company to Reginald. Read that back to me and tell me it sounds like the decision of a sane man.""It sounds," Finch said carefully, "like a man who had a reason. Augustus rarely did anything without one, even when the reason wasn

The first time Nyra Thorn heard her own wedding being planned, she was standing three feet away, and no one in the room thought to look at her."Thirty days," Marguerite said, tapping one manicured nail against the folder on her desk as though it were a business report and not her niece's entire future. "The contracts will be finalized by Friday. The announcement goes out Monday."Nyra stood near the window of her aunt's study, hands folded in front of her the way she had been taught since childhood, spine straight, eyes low enough to seem deferential but not so low that she looked frightened. It was a posture she had perfected over eighteen years of being present in rooms where her presence did not matter. She had learned that the best way to survive the Thorn household was to take up as little space as possible, to become a shape in the corner rather than a person at the table."Whose wedding?" she asked, and hated herself immediately for asking, because she already suspected the an