The Ash and the Ember
In Thornveil, a salt-bitten coastal fortress ruled from the crown of a blackened spire, Sera Voss scales the outer wall in the dark, counting three hundred and twelve steps to a window where a man should already be bleeding out beneath her. She is the kind of killer who leaves no footprints and takes no names, and she has come a long way to put a knife through one specific throat before dawn. But the room she slips into is empty. The man she was sent to kill is already hunting her, and somewhere in the fortress a second blade has been turned against her in turn. Caelor Thane, the lord who holds Thornveil from the spire's peak, has spent years turning every shadow into an informant, and one of them wears a face she trusted. Maren, her oldest ally, has gone silent. Yseult, the woman who taught her to kill, is selling names to the highest bidder. Dorian plays every side at once. Petra guards a door that should not exist. Whisper is bleeding out in an alley below. Lira carries a letter Sera was never meant to see. And Aldric remembers what she did on the night the river ran black. Every path out of Thornveil leads through a different kind of betrayal. To survive until dawn, Sera must choose the contract that pays for her mother's grave, or burn it, and the spire with it, and every name in the fortress that knows her face.