Paper Veins

Not every kind of love is meant to last. Some are meant to burn.

Calla Walsh came to Thornbridge to disappear. To write. To outrun the past that's still buried under her skin. But the moment she walks into Professor Adrian Crane's poetry seminar, everything shifts. He's brilliant. Magnetic. Sharp in ways that aren't just intellectual. And he sees her-really sees her-in a way no one ever has. What begins as curiosity turns into something darker. A connection. A pull. A quiet unraveling neither of them know how to stop.

Crane is everything Calla should avoid. Older. Wounded. Bound by rules he helped write. But the closer they get, the more the line between mentor and lover fractures. Their relationship becomes a secret poem-read between the lines, passed in glances, stitched into silences. But secrets demand sacrifice. And obsession always has a cost.

Paper Veins is not a love story. It's a story about what happens when love and power twist into each other. About the difference between being chosen and being claimed. It's for the readers who want their romance jagged, poetic, and a little bit wrong. It's for the ones who know that the most beautiful things we write often come from the ugliest places.

Set in the shadowed lecture halls of an elite university, this is a dark academia romance for readers who like their stories slow-burning, sharp-edged, and emotionally honest. There's spice, yes-but beneath it, there's a reckoning. With the past. With the power we give away. And with the person we become when we finally decide to take it back.

If you're looking for a dark, literary romance that doesn't flinch-where trauma is not decoration, and love doesn't always save you-Paper Veins is waiting. Just don't expect it to be gentle.