The Hanged Man's Gambit: A Dark Academia Tarot Magic Romantasy of Secret Societies and Deadly Rivals

She won the duel. Now students are dying for it.Lyra Belacqua arrived at Saint Jude's Institute of Arcane Cartomancy with one plan: be the best, reveal nothing, and leave with her secrets intact.She is a scholarship student from a disgraced bloodline, hiding an ability so dangerous the institution erased her family from the record to contain it. When she beats the most powerful student on campus in a public card-casting duel, she secures her place in the school's elite order.Then a girl turns up dead in the library. Ten obsidian swords arranged across her chest. A perfect recreation of a tarot card.The investigation changes everything.To prevent a panic, the school assigns Lyra a co-investigator: Julian Vane, the arrogant heir to the most powerful casting legacy in four generations.He is cold. He is brilliant. He is secretly dying from a curse his own family administered to keep him manageable.To solve the murders, they will have to trust each other. To survive the investigation, they will have to understand what is happening between their decks when they cast together.What is happening should not be possible.The magic has rules. The rules are breaking.At Saint Jude's, card-casting follows hard laws. Every card has finite uses. Every cast leaves a mark. And two practitioners' decks do not respond to each other - not ever, not under any circumstances.Except now they do.As bodies accumulate and the tarot pattern becomes clear, Lyra and Julian discover the murders are not random. They are a ritual. Someone is building an architectural framework in the school's foundational magic - one dead student at a time.And the only practitioner who can stop it is Lyra.Which is exactly what the killer is counting on.A rivals-to-lovers slow burn with real stakes.- A hard-rule magic system built on tarot cards, casting costs, and a 79th card that should not exist- A rivals-to-lovers romance that earns every moment - fifteen chapters of two people being precise about everything except what they feel- A murder mystery where the institution itself is part of the problem- A heroine hiding a forbidden bloodline who discovers it was never a flaw- A dying hero with a plan three years in the making and a clock running down he Hanged Man's Gambit is the first book in the Lost Suit Chronicles - a dark academic fantasy series for readers who want the slow burn, the magic system, and the body count.Perfect for fans of: Dark academic fantasy - Rivals-to-lovers romance - Hard-rule magic systems - Secret societies - Tarot as narrative - Murder mystery with magical stakesThe investigation begins on page one. The bond begins before either of them knows what it is.