The maggieverse has heard hints from elsewhere about what Abrogail likes and would like to present the following:

A novel with "psychological horror" warnings on it but nonetheless genre-tagged for romance, about a girl who grows up in a monarchist, feudal-adjacent dystopia where personal relationships are overshadowed by personal gain and everyone has to keep an eye out for backstabbing at all times; while carefully balancing her legal obligations to her parents and teachers with the extra-obligatory factors that will prevent them from discarding her before she's gotten everything she needs out of them, the young noble girl at the center of the story yearns for genuine affection and care such as she had once received from a nanny who was executed for crimes it had been convenient to her parents to frame her for when she was very young. At a social event, she is briefly distracted from checking various refreshments for poisons or mind-altering drugs by a handsome young nobleman with a charming smile, who over the course of the next in-universe weeks takes an interest in her without making clear any ulterior motives and slowly seducing her into trusting him. After she has fallen thoroughly into his clutches, he proceeds to betray her in the most viciously pragmatic way possible, stripping her of several opportunities she had spent years cultivating at the behest and payment of her rivals. A brief window into his perspective shows that he thinks of her as pathetic and almost hopelessly naive, but that there's a chance she'll take the event as the reality check it is and shape up into someone it would be dangerous to overlook and with a quite central grudge against him, so he's preparing to order some token security measures against her when, mid-sentence, his perspective cuts off.

A reframe back to the protagonist's viewpoint shows her as having picked up the pieces of her shattered psyche quite effectively, if not perhaps in what a normal person would call the usual fashion, and having decided that the extent to which she could blame him for doing exactly the same thing anyone else would have done to her given the chance is vastly overshadowed by how skilled he was at making her feel good and happy and adored when he was trying to do that. So she has decided to kidnap him and psychologically break him into doing what she wants again, using resources that she had continued hiding from him even while she trusted him out of sheer habit. The torture scenes, both physical and mental, are lovingly described, and the boy pretends to break several times before it actually happens, only to be caught out by clever tests the protagonist devises.

For the rest of the book, the protagonist's rise through the ranks of the kingdom is steady, even though she starts out lower than she would have if she had never fallen for the boy's original betrayal, and although her rivals initially deride her for spending so many resources on acquiring her pet, it turns out that having a consistent source of extremely basic emotional needs strengthens her considerably psychologically, giving her the edge she needs to triumph over several crucial rivals. At the end of the book she has acquired a position of direct service to the king, who is so impressed by her effectiveness in bending her pet's will to her own that he puts her in charge of breaking critically important dissidents.

The maggieverse has heard hints from elsewhere about what Abrogail likes and would like to present the following:

A novel with "psychological horror" warnings on it but nonetheless genre-tagged for romance, about a girl who grows up in a monarchist, feudal-adjacent dystopia where personal relationships are overshadowed by personal gain and everyone has to keep an eye out for backstabbing at all times; while carefully balancing her legal obligations to her parents and teachers with the extra-obligatory factors that will prevent them from discarding her before she's gotten everything she needs out of them, the young noble girl at the center of the story yearns for genuine affection and care such as she had once received from a nanny who was executed for crimes it had been convenient to her parents to frame her for when she was very young. At a social event, she is briefly distracted from checking various refreshments for poisons or mind-altering drugs by a handsome young nobleman with a charming smile, who over the course of the next in-universe weeks takes an interest in her without making clear any ulterior motives and slowly seducing her into trusting him. After she has fallen thoroughly into his clutches, he proceeds to betray her in the most viciously pragmatic way possible, stripping her of several opportunities she had spent years cultivating at the behest and payment of her rivals. A brief window into his perspective shows that he thinks of her as pathetic and almost hopelessly naive, but that there's a chance she'll take the event as the reality check it is and shape up into someone it would be dangerous to overlook and with a quite central grudge against him, so he's preparing to order some token security measures against her when, mid-sentence, his perspective cuts off.

A reframe back to the protagonist's viewpoint shows her as having picked up the pieces of her shattered psyche quite effectively, if not perhaps in what a normal person would call the usual fashion, and having decided that the extent to which she could blame him for doing exactly the same thing anyone else would have done to her given the chance is vastly overshadowed by how skilled he was at making her feel good and happy and adored when he was trying to do that. So she has decided to kidnap him and psychologically break him into doing what she wants again, using resources that she had continued hiding from him even while she trusted him out of sheer habit. The torture scenes, both physical and mental, are lovingly described, and the boy pretends to break several times before it actually happens, only to be caught out by clever tests the protagonist devises.

For the rest of the book, the protagonist's rise through the ranks of the kingdom is steady, even though she starts out lower than she would have if she had never fallen for the boy's original betrayal, and although her rivals initially deride her for spending so many resources on acquiring her pet, it turns out that having a consistent source of extremely basic emotional needs strengthens her considerably psychologically, giving her the edge she needs to triumph over several crucial rivals. At the end of the book she has acquired a position of direct service to the king, who is so impressed by her effectiveness in bending her pet's will to her own that he puts her in charge of breaking critically important dissidents.

The maggieverse has heard hints from elsewhere about what Abrogail likes and would like to present the following:

A novel with "psychological horror" warnings on it but nonetheless genre-tagged for romance, about a girl who grows up in a monarchist, feudal-adjacent dystopia where personal relationships are overshadowed by personal gain and everyone has to keep an eye out for backstabbing at all times; while carefully balancing her legal obligations to her parents and teachers with the extra-obligatory factors that will prevent them from discarding her before she's gotten everything she needs out of them, the young noble girl at the center of the story yearns for genuine affection and care such as she had once received from a nanny who was executed for crimes it had been convenient to her parents to frame her for when she was very young. At a social event, she is briefly distracted from checking various refreshments for poisons or mind-altering drugs by a handsome young nobleman with a charming smile, who over the course of the next in-universe weeks takes an interest in her without making clear any ulterior motives and slowly seducing her into trusting him. After she has fallen thoroughly into his clutches, he proceeds to betray her in the most viciously pragmatic way possible, stripping her of several opportunities she had spent years cultivating at the behest and payment of her rivals. A brief window into his perspective shows that he thinks of her as pathetic and almost hopelessly naive, but that there's a chance she'll take the event as the reality check it is and shape up into someone it would be dangerous to overlook and with a quite central grudge against him, so he's preparing to order some token security measures against her when, mid-sentence, his perspective cuts off.

A reframe back to the protagonist's viewpoint shows her as having picked up the pieces of her shattered psyche quite effectively, if not perhaps in what a normal person would call the usual fashion, and having decided that the extent to which she could blame him for doing exactly the same thing anyone else would have done to her given the chance is vastly overshadowed by how skilled he was at making her feel good and happy and adored when he was trying to do that. So she has decided to kidnap him and psychologically break him into doing what she wants again, using resources that she had continued hiding from him even while she trusted him out of sheer habit. The torture scenes, both physical and mental, are lovingly described, and the boy pretends to break several times before it actually happens, only to be caught out by clever tests the protagonist devises.

For the rest of the book, the protagonist's rise through the ranks of the kingdom is steady, even though she starts out lower than she would have if she had never fallen for the boy's original betrayal, and although her rivals initially deride her for spending so many resources on acquiring her pet, it turns out that having a consistent source of extremely basic emotional needs strengthens her considerably psychologically, giving her the edge she needs to triumph over several crucial rivals. At the end of the book she has acquired a position of direct service to the king, who is so impressed by her effectiveness in bending her pet's will to her own that he puts her in charge of breaking critically important dissidents.

The maggieverse has heard hints from elsewhere about what Abrogail likes and would like to present the following:

A novel with "psychological horror" warnings on it but nonetheless genre-tagged for romance, about a girl who grows up in a monarchist, feudal-adjacent dystopia where personal relationships are overshadowed by personal gain and everyone has to keep an eye out for backstabbing at all times; while carefully balancing her legal obligations to her parents and teachers with the extra-obligatory factors that will prevent them from discarding her before she's gotten everything she needs out of them, the young noble girl at the center of the story yearns for genuine affection and care such as she had once received from a nanny who was executed for crimes it had been convenient to her parents to frame her for when she was very young. At a social event, she is briefly distracted from checking various refreshments for poisons or mind-altering drugs by a handsome young nobleman with a charming smile, who over the course of the next in-universe weeks takes an interest in her without making clear any ulterior motives and slowly seducing her into trusting him. After she has fallen thoroughly into his clutches, he proceeds to betray her in the most viciously pragmatic way possible, stripping her of several opportunities she had spent years cultivating at the behest and payment of her rivals. A brief window into his perspective shows that he thinks of her as pathetic and almost hopelessly naive, but that there's a chance she'll take the event as the reality check it is and shape up into someone it would be dangerous to overlook and with a quite central grudge against him, so he's preparing to order some token security measures against her when, mid-sentence, his perspective cuts off.

A reframe back to the protagonist's viewpoint shows her as having picked up the pieces of her shattered psyche quite effectively, if not perhaps in what a normal person would call the usual fashion, and having decided that the extent to which she could blame him for doing exactly the same thing anyone else would have done to her given the chance is vastly overshadowed by how skilled he was at making her feel good and happy and adored when he was trying to do that. So she has decided to kidnap him and psychologically break him into doing what she wants again, using resources that she had continued hiding from him even while she trusted him out of sheer habit. The torture scenes, both physical and mental, are lovingly described, and the boy pretends to break several times before it actually happens, only to be caught out by clever tests the protagonist devises.

For the rest of the book, the protagonist's rise through the ranks of the kingdom is steady, even though she starts out lower than she would have if she had never fallen for the boy's original betrayal, and although her rivals initially deride her for spending so many resources on acquiring her pet, it turns out that having a consistent source of extremely basic emotional needs strengthens her considerably psychologically, giving her the edge she needs to triumph over several crucial rivals. At the end of the book she has acquired a position of direct service to the king, who is so impressed by her effectiveness in bending her pet's will to her own that he puts her in charge of breaking critically important dissidents.