Ashes of the Ember Pact

Mira Ashworth cleans drains for a living. She is a witch in a city that has spent generations forgetting what witches are, and her only inheritance is a satchel of her grandmother's oldest cantrips and a voice that whispers warnings from beyond the grave. On a rain-slick night in Foundry Lane, she pries up a grate and finds something that should not exist: the skeletal remains of the Ember Pact, the original treaty that stripped her kind of power and chained them to silence. Before she can bury it again, a man is dead and every shadow in the city points at her. The Cinder Saint, Rax Corvinus, comes hunting with silver and scripture. Her grandmother's voice grows desperate, warning of something stirring beneath the towers. And Mira's brother Kade, long missing, may have died trying to undo what she has just uncovered. With Henrik Voss pulling strings from a shadow court and the rebel Sevryn Vale offering forbidden aid, Mira is forced to choose: rekindle the pact and surrender her magic forever, or burn it down and risk igniting a war the Cinder Saints cannot survive. The ashes remember. The question is whether she will.