Pretty Vicious

Laurel is a college student trying to get by without attention. She works delivery shifts for a pizza place to pay her way and keep her father fed. One night she brings an order to Ashford House, the most exclusive and secretive fraternity on campus, and sees a murder.

Witnessing it costs her any chance of walking away. The fraternity answers to The Order, a blood-bound society with a hold on politics and policing alike. Its members run on ritual, obedience and violence, and they decide Laurel will stay.

Carrson Ashford, heir to the Ashford name, is cold and used to command. Under The Order's rules he bonds her, which marks her as his in body, mind and soul. Laurel refuses to accept that without resistance.

She has her father and her own future to protect, and the only way through is initiation rites, hidden brutality and a bond that could ruin both of them.

The book is a dark academia romance with Southern Gothic touches, built on enemies to lovers and forced proximity, with morally gray leads and violence throughout. Whether love can survive a society that punishes disobedience with death is the question it turns on.