The Ivory Pawn

She was worth $2.4 million. That was the price on her father's debt — the debt he took to his grave and left to his only daughter.
Maeve Sterling is a scholarship student at Blackwood Academy, an elite boarding school where old money writes the rules and silence is the price of survival. She works three jobs, eats cold leftovers, and stays invisible. Until a black envelope sealed with white wax arrives at her door — a summons from the Order of the Ivory Crown, the most powerful and secretive society on campus.
Julian Blackwood is the Grandmaster. Cold. Calculating. Untouchable. He gives her a choice: become his personal pawn for the semester — controlled, commanded, owned — or watch her family destroyed by a debt she never signed.
He fastens a chain around her neck she cannot remove. He dictates her schedule, her clothes, her silence. He dresses her in silk but makes her wear torn sneakers — so the entire campus knows what she is. His property. His piece on the board.
But Maeve Sterling does not break.
She fights back with the only weapon Julian never accounted for: a mind sharper than his own. As the Order's deadly games escalate — break-ins, masquerade balls, midnight races through ancient catacombs — the line between obedience and obsession dissolves. Julian didn't claim her because of the debt. He bought the debt so he could claim her. And the chain he locked around her throat is nothing compared to the one tightening around his chest.
When the Order's billionaire masters demand Julian surrender her to prove his loyalty, he commits treason instead. Now hunted by the institution he once led, Julian and Maeve must burn the old guard to the ground — or lose everything.
She entered the vault as a pawn. She will leave it as a queen.
The Ivory Pawn is a standalone dark academia romance featuring a possessive, morally gray MMC, a fierce and brilliant FMC, secret society rituals, a master/servant power dynamic, and explicit content. Reader discretion advised.