➰🖤Cover Reveal with Author Interview ➜ Wonder Boy: Owned (Global Combat League Book 1) A Dark BDSM MM Romance by author Calan Mercer is releasing Oct. 6th!
Book Title: Wonder Boy: Owned
Author: Calan Mercer
Publisher: Valleyburn Press
Cover Artist: Neslihan Yardimli for BookCoverZone
Release Date: October 6, 2026
Tense/POV: third person, past tense, three alternating POV
Genres: Contemporary MM Dark/Erotic Romance, BDSM
Tropes: Forbidden love, workplace, boss/employee, age gap, power exchange, possessive mmc, insta-obsession (touch him and die), psychological, hurt/comfort, aftercare heavy
Themes: Identity, Belonging, Complicity, Power as intimacy, Self-destruction, Legacy and ownership, Survival
Length: approx. 129 000 words
It is book one in a trilogy. It ends as an HFN where it is clear there is more to resolve.
Heat Rating: 5 flames
Buy Links - Available in Kindle Unlimited
He came for the job. He left owned.
Blurb
Alex Mercer was supposed to be untouchable: the golden heir to his family's powerful law firm in Los Angeles, two years of associate experience under his belt, dispatched to Las Vegas to bring the chaotic Global Combat League to heel.
Instead, he met Jack Doyle.
Compact. Battle-hardened. Close-cropped dark hair just beginning to gray. The cold, calculating stare of a man who built an empire from nothing and never learned how to lose. One command from across the desk and Alex's perfectly tailored world began to unravel — jacket, tie, shirt — every step an exit offered and refused, every refusal a choice Alex made with open eyes.
What started as an interview ended with Alex stripped bare on Jack's desk, claimed so thoroughly he could still feel it weeks later. What started as a contract became something neither of them had a name for. And what started in Las Vegas wasn't going to stay there.
Some men break you. Jack owned him. And the worst part? Alex let him.
A dark MM romance about power, possession, and the cost of being chosen by a man who doesn't share what he claims.
Excerpt
“Kid,” Jack said. “You any good at not fucking up?”
Alex registered the question for what it was, not the interview he had prepared for, but the one underneath it, the one that wanted to know whether he was going to give a law school answer or an honest one. He had prepared the law school answer on the flight. He looked at Jack and set it aside.
“Depends on the definition,” Alex said. Then he looked at Jack and reconsidered. “Yes, sir.”
Jack’s mouth curved into something that wasn’t quite a smile. “Sir. I like that. Most of these Ivy League pricks walk in here calling me Jack like we’re old pals.” He held the look. “What does ‘yes’ mean to you?”
“It means you tell me what’s coming before it arrives, I keep it from becoming a problem. You call me after it’s already a problem, I make it go away.” He held Jack’s eyes. “Either way works. I’d rather the first.”
Jack regarded him for a moment. Then he set down what he was reading and leaned back.
“Marco says you’re good,” he said. “That means something, coming from him. I know your father. I know his firm. They’ve been handling my contracts for three years.” He picked up his mug and took a drink. “If you’re even half the lawyer Richard is, you’re worth the conversation.”
“I’m not my father,” Alex said. There was no edge to it. He was stating a fact. “But I can do the job.”
Jack looked at him with the full quality of attention he would come to understand was Jack’s primary mode: complete, unhurried, costing the subject of it nothing and requiring everything. “Just like that?”
“Just like that,” Alex said.
Jack almost smiled. He set the mug down and leaned forward, elbows on the desk.
“Alexander Mercer. Thirty. Top of your class at USC Law. You know why you’re here?”
“My father said you needed a personal attorney. Available at all hours. Fighter issues, sponsorship conflicts, anything that doesn’t go through the league office.”
“That’s the version that goes on paper.” Jack tapped the desk once with two fingers. “Off paper it’s simpler. You work for me. The league, the fighters, your old man — none of them own you. I do. I snap my fingers at three in the morning because some idiot heavyweight punched a casino bouncer, you’re already in a car. I need an NDA before breakfast because one of my champions knocked up a ring-girl, you’re already writing it. You breathe when I say breathe. You eat when I say eat. You exist for the GCL. The GCL is me. I need someone I can trust completely to have my back. Not the league’s back. Mine.” He let that land. “You want this job, Mercer?”
Alex had known, somewhere on the flight over, that he wanted it. Not only the money, though the money was real. It was the room he was sitting in. The building below, with its blood smell and its training cages. The man across the desk, who had not yet said a single thing that was anything other than exactly what he meant. Alex had spent two years in an environment that prided itself on precision and had not yet been in a room where precision was this unconcerned with its own appearance.
“Yes, sir,” he said. “I want the job.”
Jack’s eyes narrowed, dark and unreadable. He let the words hang in the air for a long ten seconds, the air conditioner droning in the background. Then he smiled, slow and predatory, a smile that had closed million-dollar deals and ended careers in the same breath.
“Good,” Jack said. “Then you’re going to prove it.”
The shift in the room was immediate, like the temperature had dropped ten degrees. Alex’s mouth went dry. He’d expected a hard interview. Maybe some locker-room hazing. Not… this. Whatever this was.
Jack stood up. He came around the desk, without announcement, without the excess of motion that would have signaled awareness of being watched. He stopped three feet away and crossed his arms and looked at Alex the way he had been looking at him since Alex walked in, which was completely and without apology.
“Take off your jacket.”
Alex blinked. Once. His heart slammed against his ribs like it wanted out. Not standard. A line. A test. The kind powerful men drew in the sand to see who’d cross it and who’d run.
Jack’s voice stayed even, almost conversational, but there was steel underneath. “You heard me. Jacket. Off. Or you can stand up right now, walk out that door, tell your Daddy I’m a crazy prick, and we’ll both pretend this meeting never happened. Your call, kid. Last chance to keep your suit clean and your dignity intact.”
Author Interview
Q: What’s your favorite scene in your latest book and what makes it a favorite?
There’s a scene called the Marcus Webb arbitration later in the book in which the main character, Alex, uses his gifts as an attorney to end a fighter’s career, and this scene is pivotal in more ways than one. Not only does Alex have an epiphany about himself and what type of person he believes he is, but I myself had an epiphany about what type of book I was writing as an author. I thought I was writing a romance about a man taken apart by love. I was writing about a man who'd been taken apart long before the book begins, and who became extraordinarily good at his job because of it. The love story is what's keeping him alive, not what's damaging him.
[Alex is arbitrating a broadcasting dispute. Opposing counsel has just conceded.]
Richard had always said that the moment a negotiation cost you something personally was the moment you had lost the higher ground. Never give them purchase. Never let them see the thing they could press on. The man who cannot be hurt cannot be beaten. Alex had been built to be unhurtable. He was unhurtable. He watched Howard bend and it cost him nothing.
Q: If you could spend some real-life time with one of the characters in the book, who would you choose and why?
Jack Doyle, though not quite for the reason people expect. He's charismatic, and he does own a room. But the thing that would actually make him good company is that he isn't performing. Everyone else in that world is. Alex most of all. Jack just says the true thing. If he likes you you'll know, and if he doesn't you'll know that too. He's a man who notices what people need and then doesn't make a performance out of having noticed.
Q: On the flipside, which character would you probably least get along with? Why?
Richard, Alex’s father. The uncomfortable part is that he isn't a monster. He's disciplined, genuinely brilliant at what he does, and he loves his son. His love and his damage are the same gesture. That's what makes him hard to argue with and impossible to be around.
He and Jack are far more alike than either would accept: both certain, both take what they want, neither apologizes for it. The difference isn't morality. Jack does things in this book I wouldn't defend. The difference is that Jack looks at what's in front of him and Richard looks at the plan. Which is the whole book, really. Alex doesn't choose the better man. He chooses the one who sees him.
Q: Let’s take off your author cap and put on your reader cap for a moment: what do you look for in a book, what sort of protagonists do you love, and do you have a favorite genre?
I'll read almost anything, but what I'm looking for is the same across all of it: a damaged protagonist, and a book that's honest about whether they get better.
That's really the whole thing for me. Not a character arc in the schematic sense — not person changes over the course of a story — but the specific question of whether someone learns how to heal, or doesn't, and gets worse. Both interest me equally. I just want the book to commit to one.
Science fiction and fantasy are my defaults, because I like being handed a whole world. But I read a lot of First and Second World War memoir, and literary fiction — the last thing I finished before this was an unpublished duology about a man who fought in both wars. Some horror. And romance, MM mostly, though I'll read any pairing if the story is good enough to warrant it. And usually the romance is ancilliary in most of the books I read. I heavily prefer an external plot over the romance doing the main lifting.
What I want from all of it is identical. I want to long for something. I want to grieve when I finish.
Q: What books and authors would you say influenced you to become a writer?
Wuthering Heights is my all-time favourite dark romance, and I think it's a better-built book than it gets credit for. Heathcliff and Catherine are appalling, they absolutely deserve each other, and they destroy themselves and most of the people near them. But underneath that all, there still is an HEA, which I am a sucker for.
Siddhartha I read as a young adult and it rearranged me: how I saw the world, how I saw myself. I've never entirely gotten over it.
And Ender's Game, which is deliberate. A child made into an instrument by adults who love him and use him in the same gesture, who becomes extraordinarily good at the thing he was built for and is ruined by being good at it. Alex is my Ender. The debt gets considerably more literal in book two, in a way I won't spoil here.
Stranger in a Strange Land, Bradbury, Good Omens — all somewhere in the mix.
Q: What are your least and most favorite things about being an author?
Most: when a reader finds the thing you buried. There's a peace lily in this book. Alex's father sends it the day he makes partner — the card says Welcome, partner — and Alex puts it where the morning light is best and waters it on Sundays. It appears four times in four hundred pages and I never explain it once. A reviewer came back to me about that plant. He'd worked out that when you stop watering something it doesn't die dramatically, it just stops growing, and that a person does the same thing. He got there entirely on his own.
That's the job, really. You put something down carefully and hope one person picks it up. It's an oddly intimate thing to do with a stranger.
Least: you cannot see your own book. I had fifteen readers on this one and they contradicted each other constantly, and the only way to work out who was right was to count. I found a phrase I'd used thirty-three times without noticing a single one of them. You spend a year making something and end up the least qualified person in the room to look at it.
The length doesn't bother me. It's the blindness.
Q: What’s the best piece of writing/author advice you’ve ever received that you’d pass on to someone just getting started in the business?
Start the story where the trouble starts, and trust the reader to catch up.
Matt de la Peña told me that, and it took me years to actually believe it. The instinct when you are starting out is to explain your character before you let anyone meet him. Twelve pages of childhood, the parents, the wound, all of it arranged neatly so the reader will understand why he is the way he is. It feels responsible. It is the thing that gets your book closed on page four.
Backstory is not the entry fee. It is the payoff. A reader who is already invested will forgive you almost anything, including a slow chapter, but you have to earn that first, and you earn it with a person in a room who wants something from someone who is not going to hand it over.
Chapter one of Owned is a job interview. A thirty-year-old attorney sits down across an oak desk from a man he has been warned owns lawyers, the chair has been set slightly too low on purpose, and within a few pages the interview has become something else entirely. The only childhood in the chapter is one sentence, near the end, after it is all over: he had been holding his spine a particular way since he was eight years old, in a conference room, with a first-aid kit on the table and a stack of case files in front of him. That is Alex's entire upbringing, one line, and it lands because the reader has just watched what it cost him. Opened the book with that conference room and it would have been information. Where it sits now, it is a wound.
Q: Have you ever written a line, paragraph, or passage, and thought, “Darn, that’s pretty amazing, even if I do say so myself”? What was it?
Yes. Once, and I know exactly where I was sitting when it happened.
It's in Owned. Alex is in a conference room, winning, watching a man's career end, and feeling nothing about it. The realization arrives sideways, the way it would for someone who has never been allowed to think about himself directly:
You could not love a person who could not be hurt. Love required vulnerability. The vulnerability of having something to lose. The risk that what you handed over might not be returned, or might be returned broken. You could not love a machine.
You could not love a principle. You could not love the living expression of "Mercers don't bend" because the living expression had no self to receive the love with. Had no place to put it. Had removed, or allowed to be removed, the capacity for imperfection and fragility that love required.
I had been circling that idea for months and could not get it to sit still. Alex is not a man who refuses love. He is a man who was built with nothing left in him to receive it. When that line finally came out I put my hands down and thought, well, that's the book. Everything else is Alex taking a hundred thousand words to find out the proof is wrong.
I went back at it three times in editing and never improved it.
Q: What’s the one genre/sub-genre you haven’t written yet, but would love to? What’s kept you from it so far?
Psychological horror, and honestly, I think I've been circling it. The book I've just written has a man who trained his own son out of crying by the age of eight, and got a superb attorney out of it. It has a character who spends four years watching himself from a slight remove, performing his own life competently and finding nobody home behind it. That's horror. I put a love story around it.
Which is also what's kept me from writing it straight. Romance gives the reader a rope. However bad it gets, someone is coming, and the reader knows it — that's the contract. Horror doesn't owe you that.
If you took Jack Doyle out of this book, what's left is a horror novel. A man engineered into an instrument by someone who loves him, and nobody in the world who notices.
I'm not sure I'm ready to write the version where nobody notices. But I want to.
Q: Let’s talk tropes: do you have a few favorites that you enjoy both writing and reading? If so, what are they and what makes them your favorites?
Angst, first and always. Give me a character who hurts, knows he is hurting, and cannot put it down. I have very little patience for protagonists who glide. Owned has angst in spades, on purpose.
Which leads straight to hurt/comfort, which is the real one for me. The hurt on its own is just misery. The comfort on its own is forgettable. Together they make the thing I actually read for. There is a chapter where Alex finally says out loud what thirty years with his father did to him, the skinned knee at eight years old and the deposition transcripts he was made to read until he stopped crying, and he comes apart. No dominance in that scene. No submission. Just Jack in front of him, tilting his chin up until Alex has to meet his eyes, thumb moving along his jaw, saying, "I don't want the version that never cracks. I want the one crying in my hands right now."
And dom/sub, though not in the strict BDSM sense. What interests me is a dominant who takes what he needs and owns the man completely, and a submissive who gets put back together by it, body and spirit. Alex spent thirty years being told he was not allowed to bend. Jack bends him, and that is what heals him.
Q: What’s the one book you’ve read in your lifetime that you wish you’d written? Why did this particular book leave such a lasting impact on you?
Wuthering Heights. It is not close.
The prose is gorgeous, and the characters are tormented in the best possible ways. Nobody in that book is trying to be likable. Heathcliff is cruel, Catherine is selfish, and the love between them is not the kind that improves anyone. Brontë never once apologizes for it or steps in to explain that she knows better. She just lets them ruin each other for four hundred pages and trusts you to stay.
That is what stuck with me. She was writing in 1847 and she was braver than most of what gets published now.
I would love to get away with that today. I would also be torn to shreds for it, so I take what I can get and put the torment where I can, haha.
About the Author
Calan Mercer writes dark, character-driven romance about powerful men and the things they can't control. A nine-year Army veteran with deployments to Iraq and Kosovo, he earned his MFA in creative writing from San Diego State University and has spent years ringside, drawn to the brutal intimacy of combat sports and the speed of the ice.
Wonder Boy: Owned is his debut and the first book in the Global Combat League series. He lives in San Diego with his husband and four very opinionated cats.
Author Links
Website | Facebook | Newsletter Sign-up
Twitter/Pinterest/TikTok @calanmercer
Instagram/Threads: @calanmercerwrites
Comments
Post a Comment