She was covered in his brother’s blood. And that was all the proof he needed. Sera Voss has spent her life invisible. Unwanted. Powerless. Painfully human in a world ruled by dragons. Survival meant staying quiet, staying small… and never being seen. Until the night she is found kneeling beside a dying dragon prince. And the king sees her. Kael Dravon does not hesitate. He does not question. And he does not forgive. To him, she is not a girl. Not innocent. Not human. She is the last thing his brother saw before he died. So he gives her a fate worse than death. Locked beneath his empire, chained within his reach. Kept close… so he can watch her suffer. But Sera does not break. She watches. She listens. And she begins to realize the truth. The murder was too perfect, the evidence was too clean. Someone wanted her there. The real killer did not flee. He is still inside the palace. Sitting at the king’s table. Speaking loyalty while the only witness to the truth rots in chains. And Kael is hunting the wrong enemy. As his hatred begins to twist into something far more dangerous, an ancient bond awakens between them, the one that should not exist. The one his bloodline has not seen in three hundred years. A bond between a dragon king… and a human girl. Unless she was never fully human at all. Someone has been lying for twenty-three years. And when the truth finally breaks, Kael won’t just lose his enemy. It will destroy him.

She buried him three years ago. Last night he knocked on her door. Mara knows the man on her porch is not her husband because Elliot drowned in the cove below their coastal house and his body was never found. She has the death certificate. She has the empty right side of the bed. She has three years of learning how to be a person who survives the unsurvivable. But she lets him in anyway. What follows is six months of the most dangerous thing Mara has ever done. Not because the thing wearing her dead husband's face wants to hurt her. But because it is giving her everything the real Elliot never quite managed. His full attention. His patience. His presence without the absence inside it. And somewhere between November and May, it stops pretending to feel something because it actually feels it.