Seven Years, Freely Given: A Dragon Shifter Marriage of Convenience Romance

The debt was going to save her sister's life. Margit never asked what it would cost her.Her sister is dying of a fever no poultice can touch, and there is only one place left in Hollowmere to ask for help: the water beyond the sunken chapel, where the old stories say something still listens. Something answers. And when it does, it doesn't ask for coin.It asks for seven years.Not years stolen from her life - years owed forward, spent in service to a man who is not, strictly speaking, a man at all. Corvin is two hundred years old, careful in every gesture, and holding a shape that isn't fully his own - a dragon shifter who needed a healer steady enough not to flinch when the holding finally fails.Margit didn't come to this house to fall for him. She came to survive a debt.But debts don't stay simple. Not when a locked door on the second floor holds something he's never explained. Not when the Guild starts watching the house too closely for anyone's comfort. Not when forced proximity turns a stranger's household into the one place she's ever been fully seen - and the bargain that bound them begins to feel less like a sentence and more like a choice.This slow burn dragon shifter romance is a gothic-tinged story about a bargain that was never really about the years at all. She agreed to owe him seven of them. She never agreed to want to stay.Seven Years, Freely Given. Some debts you pay. This one, she chose to give.