DivineDB

Reading, reimagined for women.

[divinedb]

Omega Off Record

by Nadia Volkov

Iris Voss's name is on every mating bond in the city. As Director of Records at Castellan House, she countersigns each contract, files it in the vault, makes it real. She is the most trusted registrar the firm has ever had — precise, unbonded, married to the work. The firm believes she has no bond of her own.

The firm is wrong.

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[divinedb]

Say No to Me

by Violet Sinclair

Greer Mahon has built a career, and a self, on the word no. For twenty years she has been the most feared eye in Chicago — the art authenticator collectors hire when they need someone who cannot be flattered, cannot be hurried, and will not sign her name to a beautiful lie. Then she refuses to authenticate a painting the whole city wants to be real, and the whole city decides it is finished with her.

When a rival tells her that her no has stopped being judgment and curdled into reflex — that she would reject anything, anyone, simply to feel certain — Greer does the only thing a woman like her can do with an accusation. She designs an experiment to disprove it. For the twenty-eight days of February she will say yes. To every invitation, every request, every dare. At the end of the month she will switch her judgment back on and prove it was never broken.

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[divinedb]

Good Girls Finish Last

by Scarlett Quinn

Three times Iris Vance has sat the Master Sommelier exam. Three times she's been flawless. Three times she's failed by a hair — and the examiner on the other side of the tasting table has watched her do it every time.

August Roe doesn't tell candidates why they fail. He tells Iris anyway. She doesn't taste the wine, he says — she performs it. She gives the room the answer it wants instead of the one in her own mouth. He's right, and she hates him for it, and she hates more that it isn't only true of wine. It's true of every bed she's ever been in. True of the polite, useful, perfectly behaved woman she built so that someone, anyone, would love her without being asked twice.

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[divinedb]

Unscented

by Nadia Volkov

In the city of Vael, an omega is worth what her scent will fetch. They are graded like grain, priced like silver, and sold to the alphas who can afford them. Mira Voss cannot be graded. She was born without a scent of any kind — a ghost, the Registry calls her, an omega no nose can find, no alpha can claim, no ledger can price. For thirty-four years that has been her shame. It has also, quietly, been her weapon.

From a clerk's desk in the Registry's lower archive, Mira has spent eleven years forging the papers that steal doomed omegas out of the city — and no one has ever caught her, because no one can follow a woman who leaves no trace. Then a child's name appears on the remission list, an auditor is sent down into her archive, and three alphas walk into her careful, invisible life. The inspector trained to read every lie a body tells, who finds in her a silence he cannot translate. The clockmender who lost his own sense of smell, and to whom her blankness is no flaw at all. The smuggler who has worked beside her for years without a face, and who has never once wanted something he could not track.

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[divinedb]

Pretty Little Reaper

by Scarlett Quinn

Wren Marlow is the youngest reaper in her bloodline, and her first solo collection is a name she already knows by heart. Cassian Vael. Four hundred and thirty-seven years old. Eleven reapers before her. Including her older sister, who walked into his Upper East Side townhouse at twenty-two and never came out.

Wren is not going to fall. She has a folding blade in her bag, a grudge a decade in the making, and exactly zero interest in whatever charm killed every Marlow woman before her. She's going to do the job, drag her sister's name out of the Bureau's compromised file, and go home.

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[divinedb]

Welcome to OmegaLand

by Nadia Volkov

Three years into her contract at OmegaLand — the world's most exclusive omega wellness resort — Vesna has learned the rules. Smile in the brochures. Hit her heat schedule. Don't ask what happens in the suites with the soundproofed doors. The pay clears her sister's debts. The pastel uniforms hide the bruises. The system works, as long as she does.

Then Adrian Roth arrives. The founder's son. The heir. The man whose face is on the wall of every staff lounge, smiling with corporate confidence beside the words BUILDING THE FUTURE OF OMEGA WELLNESS. He has come for a site review. He has come, his father insists, to learn the business. He has not come for her.

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[divinedb]

Old Enough to Know Better

by Claire Beaumont

Margot Lindquist is forty-one years old, two years a widow, and finally ready to finish the house her husband did not live to start. She hires the only restoration carpenter in the county anyone will recommend twice: Theo Vance, twenty-six, quiet, almost insultingly competent, and entirely too easy to look at across a kitchen that still has her husband's coffee cup on the windowsill.

He was supposed to take six weeks. He stays through the autumn. He stays through the first hard frost. He learns which floorboards she avoids and why. He does not ask what she lost. He does not need to.

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Big Mama's

by Diana Reyes

Virginia Salinas was thirty-three years old the day her sister died in an H-E-B parking lot and left her three children behind. She is forty-nine now. The children are grown. The smokehouse her grandfather opened in 1968 still runs on her hands. She has been everyone's Tía Virgie for so long she has forgotten what it would feel like to be something else.

Reyes Marchán is thirty, a Texas Monthly journalist, and a former line cook with knife scars on his fingertips and a graduate-school accent he can't quite control. He shows up at Salinas BBQ in late September because a famous Austin chef name-dropped the place in an interview. He plans to stay three days. He stays six weeks. He orders the brisket without sauce on the first day, and Virgie walks out of her pit room for the first time in nine months to look at the man who knew not to ask for sauce.

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[divinedb]

The Bigger Half

by Violet Sinclair

When they were born, Sloane was the bigger twin. The family joke calcified into a sentence: Wren got the smaller half. She has spent thirty-three years occupying less room than the world expected of her — quieter, lesser, the one Sloane was free to outgrow.

Then Sloane's husband arrives at their grandmother's coastal Maine cottage on a logistical errand, and finds Wren living there. He stays one night because of weather. He stays another because he can't account for why he wants to. Across three weeks of a New England autumn, the man who has always called Wren the smaller half discovers a woman his marriage had not prepared him to see.

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[divinedb]

Choke or Cry, Pick One

by Nadia Volkov

Three years ago, Iris Bell heard a child die through her own headset. She has not cried since.

Now her younger sister is missing, and the only contact is a man who calls at 11:47 every night and does not threaten her. He asks her questions. He hangs up at midnight. When he finally tells her where to come, Iris signs his contract because she has no other door left to open: thirty days in his canyon house, his rules, his ritual. Every night at the same hour she comes to his study, and every night he gives her one choice.

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[divinedb]

Convert Me

by Sienna Cole

Rae Linwood deprograms people for a living. Eighty-seven extractions, thirty-one returns, one funeral she never went into. At forty-one she has a strip-mall practice in Boise, a four-year rule against taking clients under twenty-five, and a grant renewal that depends on a kid named Halberstadt staying out a little longer.

Then Aron Decker walks into her office claiming he left the Light of the Open Hand four days ago via the back gate. He is twenty-six. He is too composed. The Decker family has wired the retainer.

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[divinedb]

She Eats First

by Scarlett Quinn

Roe Calderón has been the matriarch's enforcer for twelve years. She breaks bones to keep the Mojave clan in line, fucks who she wants, and answers to one dying woman in a hospice bed outside Las Vegas. When the matriarch goes, the seat is hers. All Roe has to do is kill the only challenger willing to step into the Cackle — her own sister.

Idris Marsh arrives in a black suit, with a black ledger, and an offer from a rival clan: skip the ritual. Bond with him. Take the merged seat as queen of both clans, no sister required to die. He doesn't flirt. He doesn't flinch. He just sits in her kitchen drinking coffee, counting bones in his notebook, watching her like he already knows how this ends.

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[divinedb]

Unhinged and Unmedicated

by Violet Sinclair

Margot Lévay sold a celebrated debut novel at twenty-five and has not finished another book since. For seven years she has been writing in secret, convinced her medication has flattened the voice she used to have. Six weeks ago, against every recommendation, she stopped taking it.

The book she has written since is the first one she has finished. It is also a novel about her psychiatrist.

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[divinedb]

Witness Bred

by Nadia Volkov

She was meant to disappear. He was meant to keep her alive. Nobody told either of them that the cover identity already written down in a small Vermont town was husband and wife.

Lia Mercado spent three years building the paper trail that would put the Caleón cartel's American comptroller in federal prison. Now she has six months until trial, a new name she didn't choose, and a deputy marshal who watches her like a man counting exits. He says almost nothing. He notices everything. And the first time the neighbor across the porch railing calls her Mrs. Wells, he doesn't correct her — he puts his hand on the small of her back and says yes.

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Pucking and Fucking Around

by Rosalie James

Beau Lachance has spent twelve years being the loudest man in the Hartford Foxes' locker room. Enforcer. Bachelor-auction headliner. The guy with a girl in every road city and a contract extension on the line. He has a system. The system has kept him employed and kept him from thinking about the teammate he had a thing with in juniors at seventeen — the one whose career didn't survive when theirs got found out.

Theo Park is twenty-three, a fourth-line call-up from Springfield, and the most visible out player in the league since he wrote his own coming-out piece at nineteen. He is tired of diversity panels, tired of his estranged brother, and very tired of being a headline. He'd like to play hockey for a team that lets him be boring.

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[divinedb]

Delulu Dicked Down

by Scarlett Quinn

Margaux Reyes built her 1.2-million-follower empire preaching the gospel of delulu — manifest the man your therapist warned you about, want what you're not supposed to want, ask out loud. For two months she's been publicly manifesting one specific stranger on her show. A man in a suit she saw once and never spoke to. Her listeners are obsessed. The bit is the engagement engine carrying her toward a seven-figure brand deal.

She doesn't know he's been listening.

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[divinedb]

Hotwife Out of Office

by Violet Sinclair

Lena Marchetti-Hale has spent sixteen years being responsible. She runs the calendar, the schedules, the precise emotional temperature of two children and a husband she still, in some buried way, loves. She has not been hungry in a decade.

Daniel takes her to Amalfi for their anniversary. On the second night, on a terrace above the sea, he makes her an offer he has been rehearsing for two years: ten days, no questions asked, anyone she wants — and she comes back to him every night and tells him everything. Not because he is bored of her. Because he has been watching her disappear, and he does not know how to bring her back alone.

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