BOUND BY STARLIGHT

She came to steal one stone. She left with two kingdoms, four impossible men, and a war she didn't start.

Sloane Caelan has three rules: steal clean, trust no one, and never stop running. She breaks all three before dawn.

Caught robbing the Winter Court's most sacred vault, she learns the truth her dying mother hid: seven years ago, Sloane was sold. A blood contract bound her to Prince Kael Frost as payment for a fever cure she was never meant to survive. The claiming ceremony is tonight. The collar is already warm.

She runs.

Breaking the contract shatters the thousand-year-old border between Winter and Summer courts, floods her blood with magic no mortal was built to hold, and binds her — through a resonance that defies every law either court has ever written — to not one man but two: Kael, ice-cold and desperate, whose court is dying breath by frozen breath. And Darian, his exiled brother, all summer warmth and sharp smiles, who helps her escape and definitely has his own reasons for it.

Then both courts send armies. Two monarchs make an offer that isn't really an offer. Sloane gets a collar, a deadline, and a deal: produce the prophesied heir within one year — a child carrying all three bloodlines who can break both curses — or watch everyone who has sworn to her die screaming.

She accepts. Because she is a thief, and thieves know when to take the deal and when to steal the table it was sitting on.

What follows is one year of building something from nothing, learning to wield magic that keeps trying to kill her, surviving assassination attempts and political trials and two princes in her bed, and slowly — against every instinct she has — learning to trust. Finn Calloway, her partner of three years and secret keeper of two, whose loyalty was real even when his agenda wasn't. Emryn Vale, the Summer Court's deadliest commander, who starts as her trial opponent and ends as something she doesn't have a word for yet. Ravens, the assassin who chose her without reason and stayed without being asked.

The courts want her heir. The prophecy wants her blood. Her magic wants to unmake the world.

Sloane Caelan wants to choose.

For once in her borrowed life — she will.