The novel
Shadows of the Exiled
She's the key to a stolen crown, the last of a murdered line, and more dangerous than she has ever dared to believe. Everything she touches dies. Except him.
Ten years after a usurper slaughtered her family, Princess Rhianne Vanserra lives hidden in the frozen mountains, keeping everyone at arm's length—because the shadow in her blood turns living things to ash. Then word comes: her last protector is dead, the Regent knows where she sleeps, and the most feared assassin in the realm is riding north to find her.
The assassin is everything the stories promised: masked, merciless, and very good at his work. They call him the Kestrel. But Severin doesn't want her dead. At his coronation, he means to chain her into an ancient blood ritual, using the last living heir of the royal line to bind every oath ever sworn to her father's crown to him alone. Rhianne won't just be his prisoner. She'll be the lock on the whole kingdom's cage.
And the Kestrel has a secret of his own. He is the only man alive whose skin doesn't wither under her hands. When he touches her, the shadow goes quiet—and something warmer wakes in its place.
With the Feast of the Winter Sun only days away, a fortune in emeralds on his side of the bargain, and a lie he's been keeping for ten years, Rhianne must decide whether the man leading her into her father's stolen city is her captor, her weapon… or the one thing she can't afford to lose.
Content note
Violence and on-page death, executions, a child in danger, grief and loss, and one explicit romantic scene.
