The Gilded Tail

In the nation of Veridia, disgraced ethics professor Cassian Wren is forcibly committed to the Covenant Psychiatric Institute after exposing a fatal flaw in his family's pharmaceutical dynasty. Stripped of his identity and subjected to brutal electroshock therapy, he must navigate a labyrinth of institutional greed and shattered memory to convince a single, weary doctor of his sanity. But the true serpent coiled at the heart of the facility is not his alleged delusion—it is humanity's primal, insatiable greed, a fatal evolutionary tail that refuses to be shed. Told in E. Lockhart’s signature fractured prose, this psychological thriller explores a desperate fight for rebirth against a system designed to consume the inconvenient.