“Everything you choose leads back to me.” — Lorien Blackbourne
The Veil between life and death is thinning, and something on the other side has finally found what it was looking for.
Alaia Severyn survived the Winter Temple, six Legion campaigns, and magic that shouldn’t exist — ice and shadow, braided together in a body that has no business holding either. What she cannot survive is losing control of it. The Legions do not rehabilitate unstable weapons.
Lorien Blackbourne, High Lord of the Shadow Lands, has governed the threshold between life and death for centuries. He is ruthless, precise, and deeply uninterested in problems he didn’t create. Alaia is a problem he didn’t create. He takes her in anyway — because what lives in her blood is not a malfunction. It is a key. And Hell knows exactly what door it opens.
He will train her. Lie to her. Let her hate him if that’s what it takes. The eclipse is coming, the Veil is fracturing, and the dead are not going where they’re supposed to go.
He will not lose her to it.
Dark, layered, and sardonic — for readers of dark romantasy with the bones of epic fantasy: political courts, liminal realms, morally complex characters, and a romance that earns its heat.
