Celeste Ashford

She infiltrated the empire that destroyed her city. He's the commander who led the siege.

Sera Voss lost everything when the empire burned her city to the ground. Now she's inside the Collegium, posing as a loyal imperial alchemist, stealing the secrets behind the Marrow Decree — the extraction program draining the continent's magical substrate to fuel the empire's war machine. Her mission is simple: gather intelligence, sabotage from within, and never get attached. Especially not to Commander Aldric Wren — the man who led the siege that killed her mother.

Aldric has spent twelve years proving he is nothing like his father — a records officer executed for treason after warning that the Decree would destroy the very fabric of reality. But when Aldric finds his father's buried analysis and discovers the old man was right, his loyalty shatters. The only person he trusts with the evidence is the alchemist whose hands steady his and whose name is a lie he hasn't uncovered yet.

As fissures split the earth and the Weave spirals toward catastrophic collapse, Sera and Aldric must choose: protect their secrets or protect each other. In an empire that executes traitors, falling for the enemy isn't just reckless — it's a death sentence for them both.

He was sent to dismantle everything she's building. She can read the soul of every person she meets — except his.

Seraphine Voss burned down her family's empire for trafficking the people it called assets. Now she's building something better — a nation in a cursed forest where wildkin and humans trade as equals, and where her rare Naming gift awakens dormant magic in those who choose to belong.

When a dangerously competent sellsword walks out of the Thornhallow with exactly the skills Roothold needs, Seraphine gains the ally she's been desperate for — and the one person her gift can't read. His magical void makes him invisible to the Resonance that is her most intimate power. For a woman who built everything on the ability to see people truly, he is the locked door she can't stop circling.

What she doesn't know: he was sent to destroy everything she's building.

The fortress chose her. The bond is killing her. The mercenary who treats her like a person might be the only thing that breaks through.

Three months after the Unraveling killed every Warden in a single night, the Pale Citadel runs on Elara Thorne's heartbeat — the only one left when the wards came looking. She was a scribe. Now she is a sovereign.

The magical bond that makes her the most powerful figure on the continent comes with a cost no one warned her about: the dampening. The fortress's ward-network interprets strong emotion as instability and suppresses it — methodically, completely. Elara performs sovereignty with desperate precision while the woman performing it disappears, feeling by feeling.

Then Castiel Dorne arrives. A disgraced mercenary who speaks to her like she's a person. Every time he does, the dampening cracks — and the world floods back, raw and overwhelming and desperately wanted — and then the fortress reasserts, and she loses a little more.