A dark Romantasy set in the hidden supernatural city of Vael Moran - where a morally grey witch who frightens her own coven must bind herself to the vampire lord who already knows exactly what she's been hiding.
"The most controlled woman in the room and the most dangerous thing in the city - and neither of them is the vampire."
An instant enemies-to-lovers fantasy romance for fans of Zodiac Academy, A Touch of Darkness, and Kingdom of the Wicked.
Don't let them see how much power you're holding. Don't give him anything he can use. Don't make the mistake of looking at him like he's a problem you can't solve. Don't let the ward-seal mean something it was never supposed to mean.
The Vaelan Compact is fracturing. Two factions - one bound by blood, one by magic - are days away from open war, and the only mechanism that can hold the peace is one no one has attempted in living memory.
A bonded governance alliance. A forced marriage. A witch and a vampire lord, sealed together by ceremony, cohabitation, and the kind of political necessity that leaves no room for personal objection.
Maren Thorne has spent eleven years making herself the most controlled, most reliable, most deliberately small presence in every room she occupies. The coven watches her because they're afraid of what she is. The council chose her because they think she's manageable.
They are both wrong.
Aldric has spent four centuries building a city, negotiating a peace, and reading every room he enters with the precision of something that has survived long enough to know where all the load-bearing walls are.
He read the intelligence reports on the witch. Then he read between them. Then he spent three evenings reconstructing what the reports had missed - and understood that the woman they had selected as a political mechanism was the most sophisticated, most deliberately hidden, and most genuinely dangerous thing in Vael Moran.
He agreed to the arrangement anyway.
This is not a love story. It is a calculated alliance between two people who have decided, professionally and completely, that it will stay that way.
They are going to be wrong about that too.
Perfect for fans of:
Slow burn romance