A Debt of Bone and Blood

By Georgia Winslow

The clasp was supposed to be worthless. That was the first lie.

Ava Holt has spent her career proving what's authentic and what's a very good forgery - a discipline that pays her bills and quiets the part of her that has never quite belonged anywhere. She catalogues the Norse dead. She does not expect them to catalogue her back.

Then someone breaks into her collection for a bone clasp too plain to matter, carves an impossible rune where it used to sit, and leaves a message in fluent, living Old Norse - a language that has no business being fluent, or living, in 21st-century New York.

A burn appears on her skin that will not fade.
Her museum board wants the clasp deaccessioned before anyone asks the wrong questions. Ava has fourteen days to figure out what it actually is, and a growing, sickening suspicion that the answer starts with her own blood.
The one man taking the evidence seriously is the one man she can't afford to trust: Ronan Flett, an Orkney-born provenance researcher whose entire faith is that even the truth can be forged - and who cannot explain what he's looking at, and won't look away from her because of it.

What Ava learns will unravel everything she thought a relic could mean, and what she's descended from. A debt she never agreed to. A goddess she was raised to think was a bedtime story. A choice that isn't fight or flee - it's turn upstream, toward the place the lie began.

She refuses to run. She refuses to kneel. And she is done letting other people decide what she owes.
For readers who love: hidden heritage, dark-academia museum intrigue, the-one-who-believes-her romance, forbidden bloodlines, Norse mythology reimagined, and a slow burn where trust is earned one piece of evidence at a time.

A relic that shouldn't exist. A rune that shouldn't be hers. A debt that's coming due whether she believes in it or not.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0HBQMDPCJ
• ISBN13: 9798189354533
• Release Date: July 2026
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 258 Pages
• Weight: 0.67 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.5" x 8.5"