She was told by an oracle she would die by water. She did not expect to wake on another world.

Kyra of Athens is twenty-two, a merchant’s daughter with a sharp tongue and her grandmother’s knack for arguing with gods—until a shoreline light drops her onto the iron beach of Zemnos, a kingdom that is not on any map she has ever read. Sold, bathed, renamed, and dressed in the pale grey robes of a palace attendant, she is carried into the city of glass and bone with nothing left of her old life but the silver streak in her hair and the Greek in her head.

She is meant to be invisible.

Then she overhears a plot to murder the Prince.

Kaerion of Zemnos is the last clean line of his House—cold, watchful, and marked from throat to wrist with the spiraling glyph of a bloodline his own brother wants extinguished. When a foreign girl in a servant’s robe speaks three words at his study door and saves his life, he does the most dangerous thing a prince of Zemnos can do with a woman who was never meant to matter.

He notices her.

What begins as a quiet alliance—a knife at the door, a shared pot of red tea, a hand-binding no one in the palace quite believes in—becomes a slow, deliberate courtship under the eye of a Queen Mother who teaches by placing, a Sworn Sister who writes letters that move armies, and a brother in the eastern wedge who is counting the days until the first mistake.

By winter, the Prince’s rooms will be locked from the inside. By spring, a crown will fall. By the long fog of the vyrhal, a foreign girl will learn what it means to be bonded, bound, and—finally—unafraid.

Perfect for readers of A Court of Thorns and Roses, Fourth Wing, The Bridge Kingdom, and From Blood and Ash.

Inside you’ll find:

• A fated-mates bond with a slow, earned burn
• Palace intrigue, assassination plots, and a brother who will not stop coming
• A displaced heroine with a Greek mouth and a survivor’s spine
• A brooding, devoted prince who means every vow he makes
• Hand-binding, ceremonial courtship, and a long winter of vyrhal
• Steam that does not arrive until it has been earned—and then does not let up
• Crown politics, a Queen Mother with teeth, and the making of a queen

Full-length standalone romantasy. Explicit on-page content. HEA guaranteed.