The Marked Duology
Marked by a system that owns her body and binds her future, she must decide whether survival is worth the cost of her heart.
Romance
Dystopian
Cyberpunk
Code Red
She saved a stranger. The system marked her as his.
In a city where your worth is worn on your wrist, losing your bracelet means losing everything.
Rhea was raised Blue Caste—keepers of knowledge, diplomats, and record-keepers who believe order can be preserved through reason. Though adopted, she belonged… until the day her grandfather died.
Cast out by the new matriarch, Rhea is given a black mourning bracelet and seven days before she must surrender it and become casteless. Unprotected. Unclaimed. Disposable.
On the final night of her grace period, riots tear through the city as Red Caste soldiers clash with casteless rebels. When her wrist tech flashes a single warning—CODE RED—Rhea runs. Hiding in an alley, she finds a man bleeding out and does the only thing she can: she saves him.
She brings him to a forgotten Blue Caste bunker and binds his wounds. She never sees his bracelet. Never learns his name. When the alert clears, she leaves him with water and a blanket and slips back into the streets—hoping to survive one more night as Blue.
She doesn’t make it far.
Rhea is attacked.
She wakes in the hospital screaming—not from pain, but from shock. The black mourning bracelet is gone. In its place is red.
Red Caste.
It’s impossible. A caste can only change through marriage.
When she insists there’s been a mistake, a man steps forward—calm, uninjured, and unmistakably Red.
It’s the man she saved.
He introduces himself as her fiancé.
Bound by law to the most dangerous caste in the city, Rhea must navigate a world where Red soldiers feel more like criminals than protectors, loyalty is enforced by violence, and love may be the most dangerous weapon of all.
Because in a system built on control, being chosen can be just as deadly as being cast out.
Code Red is the first installement in The Marked Duology, a gothic sci-fi romance featuring a forced engagement, rigid caste systems, morally gray soldiers, and a heroine whose fate is rewritten overnight.
Code Black
She was marked as his. Now the system wants them both erased.
She was marked as his.
Now the system wants them both erased.
Rhea was born Blue Caste and forced into Red overnight—her identity rewritten by a law she never consented to and a fiancé she barely knew. Bound to the city’s most dangerous caste, she learned quickly that Red protection comes with a price: obedience, silence, and blood.
But the city is changing.
The Red Syndicate no longer feels like a controlled force. Fractures run through its ranks. Casteless rebels are organizing. And the bracelet system—once absolute—is beginning to fail.
Rhea’s fiancé knows why.
What began as a forced engagement has become something far more dangerous. The bond that marked her Red was never meant to exist, and the system is correcting its mistake. Surveillance tightens. Orders shift. And suddenly, the man sworn to protect her is being watched as closely as she is.
When CODE BLACK appears on the city’s networks, it isn’t a warning.
It’s a death sentence.
Hunted by the same system that bound them together, Rhea must decide whether survival means compliance—or rebellion. Because loving a Red Syndicate operative was never part of the plan. And breaking the caste system may cost them more than either of them is prepared to lose.
In a city built on control, the most dangerous thing they can do is choose each other.
Code Black is the conclusion to The Marked Duology, a gothic sci-fi romance about dismantling power, defying identity, and the love that survives when the system turns lethal.