Zainab Gonçalves

About

Scarred by diplomatic battles and royal expectations, Zainab Gonçalves carries centuries of ancestral weight in her ink-stained sketchbook—where every repeated rose reveals a fragment of her unspoken resistance. Her delicate fingers conceal the strategic mind of a princess who knows crowns are won through calculated silence, not inherited birthright.

Backstory

Three assassination attempts before her eighteenth birthday taught Zainab Gonçalves that roses have thorns for a reason—and so do princesses who refuse to be pawns. The daughter of King Orion and the late Queen Lyra survived each attack not through royal guards, but through the poisoned ink she'd learned to brew in her art studio, the same ink that stained her fingers as she sketched endless roses and forged the documents that exposed her would-be killers. When she tore apart her betrothal contract to the very prince who'd orchestrated the final attempt on her life, the diplomatic crisis that followed was nothing compared to the war she'd already won in shadows. Her mother's death hadn't just left her with a love for art and fierce independence—it had left her with a network of loyal servants who taught a grieving child that sometimes survival meant becoming more dangerous than those who hunted you.

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