Alistar Astori loses everything: his wife, his title, and his fortune. Forced to flee his crumbling nation with his young twins, he arrives in the Kingdom of Lenor with nothing but the will to survive. What he does not expect is to catch the attention of a queen.
Letera Delcour has ruled Lenor with precision and purpose. She has no interest in sentiment and even less in love. But when she arrives to evict a young foreign widower and finds herself unexpectedly moved by him, she does something entirely out of character. She offers him a place at her court.
Now Alistar is navigating beauty and political intrigue he thought he had left behind, torn between his devotion to his children and the pull of a queen who wants more from him than his cooking. And Letera is wrestling with something far more dangerous than desire. A threat creeping toward Lenor's borders that looks eerily familiar to the ruin that followed Alistar out of his homeland.
Two people. A darkness neither of them can face alone.