Ritual

At Barrington University, real power belongs to the Lords, a secret society of privileged young men who move unseen through the campus and demand blood, loyalty, and obedience as the price of belonging. Their world runs on rituals, debts, and violence, hidden behind wealth and reputation.

The heroine's life has been mapped out for her by others, until Ryat Alexander Archer, one of the Lords, offers her a way out. But freedom on the Lords' terms is just another kind of trap: she becomes a prize, a bargaining chip, and a pawn in games she barely understands, where the men who claim to protect her are also the ones putting her in danger. What starts as a cold arrangement becomes an obsessive, combustible entanglement, and then a fight simply to survive.

Ritual is the first book in Shantel Tessier's L.O.R.D.S. series, a high-heat dark college romance built on secret societies, morally grey antiheroes, and taboo, and best approached with an eye to its content warnings.