Rite of Unity

SUMMARY:

You have until twenty-eight to be chosen. Marry or die.

In the Covenant States, marriage isn't a choice. It's a countdown. Every woman is watched, ranked, and evaluated until a man selects her or her time runs out. Maryn Veil has always known the rules. She just never expected to be chosen by him.

When Elias Hale, the president's son and the most powerful bachelor in the nation, selects her for his Rite of Unity, Maryn finds herself in a world of televised trials, formal balls, and eleven women competing for the same future. The prize is safety. The cost is everything she thought she was.

Elias is not what she expected. Thoughtful, genuine, and desperate to be better than his father, he's the kind of man she could almost believe in. But someone else is watching from the shadows, and he sees Maryn far more clearly than she's comfortable with.

As the trials tighten and the stakes become impossible to ignore, Maryn begins to understand that surviving the rite and surviving the Covenant are not the same thing. And that the most dangerous thing she can do, in a system built on compliance, is want something for herself.

Rite of Unity is a dystopian romance with a slow-burn love triangle and a world where the wrong choice doesn't just cost you everything. It erases you entirely.

 

Content Warnings

Violence & Death

  • On-page character death (multiple)
  • Murder and assassination (on-page)
  • Physical violence, including stabbing, strangulation, and hand-to-hand combat
  • Parental physical abuse (on-page)
  • Poisoning (attempted murder)
  • Public executions (referenced)
  • Rebel violence, including bombings (referenced)

Sexual Content & Sexual Violence

  • Explicit consensual sexual content (on-page)
  • Attempted rape / sexual assault (on-page, graphic)
  • Systemic sexual coercion within an oppressive institution
  • Forced reproductive medical procedures, including testing and implantation against characters' will

Substances

  • Alcohol use and intoxication
  • Attempted murder by poisoning

Systemic Oppression

  • Rigid caste system and forced social hierarchy
  • Pervasive government surveillance
  • Forced marriage and coerced matching
  • Exile and forced displacement of women
  • Starvation and extreme poverty (referenced)
  • Women held in medical facilities against their will

Other

  • Domestic violence: parent to child (on-page)

Grief and loss

  • A character held in captivity and sedated against their will
  • Radiation sickness and disfigurement (referenced)