Wealth at the Cost of a Soul: 140 years ago, a merchant blindly signed a contract. Now the debt finds Alexander Vorontsov, broke and rejected. A shadowless, ageless man offers him his greatest wish. E

Every fortune has interest — and some of it is never paid in rubles.

Alexander Vorontsov is twenty-nine, broke, and holding his twenty-third rejection letter when an email arrives naming him sole heir to a fortune he cannot explain. He has never heard of Konstantin Radzian, the reclusive billionaire who left him everything. He has no idea that the debt began a hundred and forty years earlier, when his great-great-grandfather signed a paper he didn't read closely enough — and that the interest has been quietly compounding, heir by heir, ever since.

All he has to do to claim it is make a wish. Just one, to start. His unpublished novel, finally in print, exactly as he always dreamed. It costs nothing he can see — until the grief he carries for his mother starts arriving muffled, like weather behind glass, and the man who granted the wish, ageless and elegant and utterly without a shadow, explains with perfect, courteous honesty exactly what compassion is worth on the open market.

Standing between Alexander and the slow erosion of himself are the people who refuse to let him disappear: Grisha, the roommate who's covered his rent and his back for six years running; Elena, the investigative journalist who traces the bargain across seven centuries and four other ruined families; and Camille, the sculptor whose fierce, unfiltered love keeps cutting through the numbness when nothing else can.

Lucian de Valmor has worn a dozen names since the Nevsky Prospect merchant who started it all. He has never once told a lie. He doesn't need to — desire does the work for him, offer after generous offer, each one costing a little more of what makes a person capable of love, until the final threshold arrives wearing the shape of the one wish Alexander could never bring himself to refuse: the wish that would spend his own daughter's future to buy back everything he's already lost.

There is only one soul in five generations who ever found a way to walk away whole. Alexander is running out of time to become the second.

If you love: deals with the devil, generational curses, ancient immortal antagonists, found family standing between one man and his own soul, and slow-burn love that survives the unthinkable — this is your next read.