Mara Bellamy has spent years being the woman everyone overlooks. Curvy, quiet, and content in the small town that never quite chooses her, she watches the man she once loved marry someone else and decides she is done waiting. Using an old family spell, she crafts the perfect husband from living wicker, wood, and vines. Strength, kindness, devotion. Everything she asked for.

Except she forgets to include obedience.

Elias Thorn awakens as a towering, uncanny golem with a will of his own. Blunt, fiercely protective, and already looking at Mara as if she is the only real thing in the world, he refuses to stay a quiet solution to her loneliness. What begins as a practical spell quickly turns into something far more dangerous when his honest desire and strange understanding of romance start rewriting the careful walls she has lived behind.

But magic always demands a price. As the living materials that form Elias begin to unravel, Mara must face the truth she has spent a lifetime avoiding: she can keep trying to control the man she made, or she can risk everything by choosing him freely. And Elias must decide whether remaining as a perfect creation is worth less than the chance to stay as a man who was wanted, not owned.

In a story of soft bodies, sharp honesty, and the quiet courage it takes to be chosen, one overlooked woman and the golem she brought to life discover that the most powerful magic is the kind that refuses to be perfect.

Will Mara learn to love without ownership before the spell that made him claims him back?

***

Each standalone story in The Monsters She Made introduces a new woman, a new monster, and a completely unexpected love story.

Nobody warned them their creations would choose them back.

Five women, overlooked and underestimated in equal measure, each one reaching for forgotten magic to build something that doesn't exist yet. A wicker husband. A stone guardian. A perfect magical construct. A powerful kraken. A shadow beast with motives of his own. Each creation was supposed to stay obedient, manageable, safely within the bounds of what she intended.

None of them do.

Every monster develops a mind, a heart, and a pull toward the woman who gave him life that he has no interest in suppressing. Attraction deepens into something neither maker nor made has language for. These unlikely pairs discover that the strangest love stories carry the most weight, and that sometimes the one who truly chooses her is the one she built with her own hands.

The monster she made. The man he became. Exactly who she needed.

Velvet Ink Press

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