Preview: The Wedding Ring—Mind Control Bridal Tales (Patreon)

This is a preview to my latest story, and the second entry in the Mind Control Bridal Tales series. It'll be available for purchase next week on Amazon and available for free to Kindle Unlimited subscribers.

Synopsis: A strange ring carries an absolute, irresistible power that awakens the moment it is touched, flooding the mind with compulsion and overriding rational thought in anyone it chooses to bind. When recently divorced Rebecca picks it up on a Beverly Hills street, she is instantly overwhelmed by intrusive desire and an unstoppable urge that feels both foreign and entirely her own.

That urge locks onto Mariah, her best friend’s daughter, twisting every instinct until a taboo proposal forms on Rebecca’s lips without hesitation or control. There is no resistance she can mount, only the ring’s quiet command steering her toward a future she never willingly chose.

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It began centuries ago in the heart of Renaissance Venice, where love and obsession walked hand in hand through candlelit corridors and misty canals. 

Count Alessandro di Verenzano, a man of great wealth but little luck in love, commissioned Vittorio Bellandi, a master jeweler and alchemist. The count, desperate for devotion that had always eluded him, demanded a ring that could make someone love him.

Vittorio, a man who dabbled in the mysteries of metal and magic, did as he was asked. 

He forged the ring under the light of a blood moon, setting a simple, unremarkable stone into its band. Legends say he whispered incantations over the gold, imbuing it with a power not to attract love, but to bind it. The wearer of the ring, as well as the one who placed it on another’s finger, would find themselves hopelessly, irreversibly entwined.

But as the count quickly learned, magic does not always behave as one wants. It often attracts mischief rather than favor the desperate.

When the count slipped the ring onto the hand of the woman he longed for, nothing happened. She looked at him with the same polite indifference she always had. 

Furious, he tried again, proposing to courtesans, noblewomen, even his own servants. But the ring remained cold, and the responses were all the same: "no thank you."

Vittorio’s craftsmanship and his curious spell made the ring more selective, more sentient. It refused to engage when forged, when purchased or when stolen. 

It was only when the count, heartbroken and enraged, threw the ring into the Grand Canal that its true nature revealed itself. 

A fisherman who happened upon it later that night was overcome with an inexplicable urge to offer it to the woman gutting fish beside him. She accepted without hesitation, and the two were wed by sunrise.

Thus, the curse—or gift—of the ring was discovered.

Through the ages, it slipped from hand to hand, always lost by those who had already been claimed by love, only to be found by those unaware of what they were about to step into. 

A poet in Paris picked it up from a cobblestone street and immediately proposed to the barmaid who had just served him wine. A widowed duchess in London found it tangled in the hem of her gown and offered it to her footman before she even knew what she was doing. A soldier in the trenches of war clutched it in the mud, turned to his comrade, and without thinking, asked for forever.

And now, in modern-day Los Angeles, the ring had fallen from the pocket of an unlucky-in-love tech entrepreneur. He had purchased it in an antique store, intrigued by its legend, but it had done nothing for him. 

Because the ring did not serve those who seek it.

It served those who stumble upon it by chance.

And so it lay in the gutter of a bustling street in Beverly Hills, catching the light, waiting.

Until Becky bent down to pick it up.