A Life In Hand: Creating The Illuminated Journal

Caelith has nothing worth taking. No power. No secrets. Nothing anyone could possibly want. So why is everyone coming for her? Twenty one years old, literature student, part time bookshop worker. Her life is unremarkable by every measurement that matters. Until a ritual group kidnaps her, a trained assassin is sent to finish the job, and something ancient and patient decides she is exactly who it has been looking for. There is a journal. Older than recorded history. Wanted by everyone and understood by no one. And Caelith is the key to finding it. Even though nobody asked her. Now she is navigating a world she was never supposed to know existed. With a former assassin bound to her by a blood deal. A best friend who doesn't remember the night that changed everything. A boy who has known something was different about her since day one and chose to stay anyway. And a stranger who saved her life and disappeared before she could get a single answer out of him. The deeper she goes the bigger it gets. And she is only just beginning. Some journals don't record history. They create it.

I was a brilliant artist. But I crushed my right hand saving my mafia husband, Vincent, and my ability to create died with it for three years. Vincent promised he'd make me whole again. Our private doctor swore he was doing everything he could. But my hand remained numb, useless. Then, one day, I overheard a conversation that shattered my world. "Make sure she can never create again," Vincent told the doctor. "I can't have Isabella threatening Sophia's place in the art world!" "But, Mr. Torrino, another procedure might... she could lose the hand for good." "I don't care what happens to her! Sophia saved my life. I will not let her down!" It turned out my husband was the one who had destroyed me. And the assassin, Sophia, was the woman he truly loved. He let her claim my designs, turning her into the art world’s new darling while I was trapped in a broken body. When I confronted him, pregnant with our child, he slapped me in public and told the world I was losing my mind. That night, I burned everything that bound me to him. Then I dialed an encrypted number I hadn't used in what felt like a lifetime. "Grandpa. In three days, I need to disappear."

An Alpha? 😀 Yes—an artistic one. But this time, it’s not him. It’s her. Ayla Cross, a tattoo artist who thought she had escaped her past. But no Owner of The Runed Den, she spent her nights inking stories onto other people’s skin, never realizing her own was hiding one. Until the night he walked in. Kian Vale—a mysterious stranger with eyes like liquid silver and a voice that carried thunder—came seeking a tattoo that matched the mark from Ayla’s dreams: a sigil of power older than any pack legend. When she inked it onto his skin, something inside her awakened. Her tattoos began to move. The moon itself seemed to breathe with her heartbeat. Now hunted by two rival werewolf clans, Ayla learns the truth: she is the Runed Luna, the lost heir of a bloodline thought extinct, born to command the ancient runes that shape reality itself. But every mark she draws binds her closer to Kian… and to the curse that could destroy them both. As shadows close in and bloodlines clash, Ayla must decide: Will she rewrite her fate in ink and moonlight— or be consumed by the story written beneath her skin? Unknown to you. Unknown to me. What could happen next?

For five years, Mira poured her obsession into The Reckoning of Caelen Mors—a dark fantasy about a ruthless duke and the woman he becomes dangerously fixated on. At 2:47 AM, exhausted and alone, she died at her laptop. Her final words still glowed on the screen: "Duke Caelen finally showed her his true face. It was nothing like she imagined." She woke as Isadora Vess—the secondary character from her manuscript—in a silk bed, in a monster's house, with servants calling her by a name she'd invented. The problem: Mira remembers writing this world. She knows every dark secret. She knows how the story should end. Except her memories are fractured. The manuscript was never finished. And the characters have evolved without her input, making choices she never wrote, saying things she never scripted. Worse—Duke Caelen knows she's different. He's been waiting for her. Across seventeen timelines, he's seen her arrive at this exact moment. And in three of them, everything burned. Now Isadora must navigate a world she created but no longer controls, surrounded by men who each want to use her—a charming prince offering escape, a dark count offering power, and a villain offering the only thing that might be true: the answer to why she's here, and what happens when an author gets trapped in her own story. Because in every version where Isadora arrives, the empire falls. And Caelen has been waiting a very long time to see which ending she'll choose this time.

She cupped my face in her hands and said, slow and deliberate, "We're going to make a promise. Starting tomorrow, you'll draw one sun a day in your notebook. No skipping, no cheating—you have to fill it with thirty thousand suns. Only when you've drawn the last one can you come find me."

This story follows Clara Carroll, a hardworking woman raised in poverty by her single mother in Maryland, and Shomer, the guardian angel quietly assigned to watch over her. From her last days at the University of Maryland to her first steps into the corporate world, Clara’s life is shaped by help she never sees. Shomer protects her from failure, illness, and emotional breakdown, drawing strength from her happiness. But when jealousy and betrayal cost Clara her job, the pain hits her hard and leaves Shomer too weak to keep going. With his powers fading and Clara’s life at risk, Shomer breaks the rules. He comes down to Earth as a man named Alex Thompson so he can stay close to her. As Alex helps Clara rebuild her life, they grow closer, and what starts as care turns into love. But their relationship is forbidden by the angelic council known as the Pathwardens. When heaven finds out what Alex has done, he is called back to face judgment. What follows is a conflict that could affect both heaven and Earth. Alex must choose between his duty and the woman he loves, while Clara is forced to face the truth about him and find strength she didn’t know she had.