The Honest Depths
Her song doesn't make them fall in love. It makes them tell the truth. In a world built entirely on lies, that might be the most dangerous power of all.
Saoirse has always been the wrong kind of siren. While her pod lures sailors to their deaths with songs of desire, hers compels something far more inconvenient: honesty. Involuntary, untimely, uncomfortably complete honesty. When her song drives a sailor to confess his deepest insecurities to his entire crew instead of drowning him, her pod makes their decision. Exile.
Alone in the open ocean for the first time, Saoirse is running low on options when a pirate ship appears on the horizon, moving with suspicious purpose in her direction.
Captain Emrys Vane has a problem. Several, actually. His ship owes an unpayable debt to the Admiralty of Thieves, the corrupt institution that controls every major port on the coast through blackmail, manufactured debt, and a ledger full of secrets. He cannot negotiate his way out, charm his way out, or lie his way out, because four years ago a sea-witch's curse made him physically incapable of speaking an untruth. He is a pirate in a society built on deception who cannot deceive.
What he needs, he realizes, is a siren whose song does the specific wrong thing.
Their alliance begins as a transaction: she will use her song to disrupt the Admiralty's most powerful event, he will get her access to the archives she needs to understand what happens to sirens like her. But navigating a heist through the most dangerous city on the coast, with sixty-two pirates between them and their target, has a way of turning transactions into something that doesn't have a clean name yet.
Together, Saoirse and Emrys discover that in a world where everyone is managing a performance, there is a profound and specific comfort in the presence of someone who will always tell you the truth, and who wants, more than anything, to hear yours.
The Honest Depths is a standalone adult fantasy novel about the radical intimacy of honesty, the architecture of institutional corruption, and two fundamentally incompatible people who turn out to fit together exactly right.
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