“Three couples. One rotting crown. A kingdom that runs on hollowing its own.”
Beneath the modern world lies a dragon empire built on a single monstrous law: all magic flows one way, downward, into High King Alastair — an ancient, rotting monarch who hollows the living into husks to feed a crown that is really a valve.
Three women are dragged into the dark. Three dragons bound to them by a fated magic that detonates in gold and silver at the first brush of skin. Each couple carries a piece of the same secret — that a kingdom built on taking can be re-routed to give — and together they will unmake a king who cannot be killed by force.
Fated mates. A stolen fire. And the law that binds them all.
Book One — In Ash and Ember (Clara & Silas)
“Metal remembers where it was joined — and it fails there first.”
Clara restores dead things for a living — locks, relics, astrolabes — and trusts objects more than people, because a thing with provenance can never lie about where it has been. Then she cleans the runes on a humming cylinder, her bare skin touches the stone, and it wakes, pulsing down to something vast and buried and hungry. Armored scouts drag her into the empire beneath the world.
When she is thrown before the King’s commander, the fated bond detonates in gold and silver. Silas has served the crown for three hundred years — a blade does not choose the hand — but the woman in chains is the one thing his dragon will burn the kingdom to keep whole, and the only person alive who can read the empire’s draining grid like a mechanism and turn its own heart against it.
To break a king who cannot be killed by force, they must let the empire believe a lie neither of them can take back — and Clara must decide whether being held is the same as being owned.
Alternating First Person (Clara & Silas) • HEA
Book Two — In Blood and Bondage (Vivienne & Kaelen)
“Some cages are made of iron. The worst ones you build yourself.”
Vivienne Vance is the best thief on three continents — she can read any lock the way other people read a page, but she cannot stand a room that closes in. A single stolen relic drags her seventy stories down into the buried empire, collared and caged, counting the paces of a cell that keeps getting smaller.
What the court didn’t plan for is Kaelen, the shadow-magic Inquisitor bound to her by a fated pull, the one man ordered to break her who cannot bring himself to try. Buried in the crown’s own fire is a secret that could turn a prisoner into a weapon: the King’s royal magic is not royal at all. It is stolen — a parasite draining something chained and ancient in the dark.
To bring down a throne, Vivienne must trust the enemy who caged her, read the map he carves into the guts of her prison, and turn the very mechanism that traps her into the key that frees them all.
Alternating First Person (Vivienne & Kaelen) • HEA
Book Three — In Ruin and Reign (Sabine & Cassian)
“He is not the drain. He is the key — and someone has to become the crucible.”
Sabine Mercer catalogues everything — pulse, poison, the exact moment a body begins to fail — because cataloguing is the opposite of panic. For nine years she has cauterized the warmth out of her own voice and smuggled counter-curse medicine through the drainage tunnels of a dying empire. She built the cold on purpose. Then the king’s executioner catches her.
Cassian Ashwood is the blade the crown has aimed for two hundred years — and the instant his skin meets hers, the fated bond ignites and turns his touch into a slow death. A barrier of gloves and wool and leather is all that stands between wanting each other and a drain that would grey her to nothing. The cure for the curse that will kill her is buried inside the very mechanism that feeds the throne.
To break an empire built on hollowing its own, someone has to stop running from the wound and choose to become the crucible.
Alternating First Person (Sabine & Cassian) • HEA
Throughout All 3 Books
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$364 (R6,000) $182 (R3,000)
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