The Dead Language Affair
A Dark Academia Romance

About this book:

At St. Jude's College, the basement stacks smell of disintegrating rag paper and desperation—and Alexandra Vance knows both intimately. Broke, brilliant, and one tuition payment from sleeping in her Honda, Alex needs the department's secret summer grant like she needs air. The job: translate a fifth-century palimpsest hidden in an iron chest for two hundred years. The catch: she has to do it with Julian Thorne, her aristocratic, infuriatingly handsome academic nemesis who treats rare manuscripts like accessories and her life's work like a hobby.

The manuscript rewrites history. Beneath a pious copy of Augustine lies a ciphered journal from the sack of Rome in 410 AD—secrets dangerous enough to kill for, written in a double substitution cipher that shouldn't exist for another millennium. As Alex and Julian race to break the code before a vindictive senior professor seizes the project, their war of attrition shifts into something far more dangerous. Midnight sessions in the Restricted Archives blur the line between intellectual combat and something that feels alarmingly like desire. Every decrypted line pulls them deeper into a centuries-old conspiracy—and closer to each other.

But the manuscript's secrets don't want to be found. Someone at St. Jude's has already killed to keep them buried, and as the winter symposium approaches, Alex and Julian must decide: trust the enemy who knows exactly how to destroy them, or let the truth—and their only shot at a future—burn in the archives. *The Dead Language Affair* is a dark academia romance where Latin is a weapon, tenure is a battlefield, and the most dangerous translation is the one written between the lines.