amberbreeze
Everyone in Aranthia believes Alaric Vael is already dead.
Branded a traitor, stripped of power, tortured, and cast into the forbidden Ashenmoor, the Fifth Prince is meant to vanish without a grave. No one speaks his name unless they are prepared to share his punishment.
Isolde Veyne should be the last person to save him.
Her family used her as a political offering. Alaric rejected her, placed her beneath his command in the Veiled Order, and left her with ten years of humiliation she never forgot. But when a dying friend begs her to find him, Isolde enters the Ashenmoor alone, armed with a forbidden tracking mark, old resentment, and the kind of survival skills court ladies are not supposed to have.
She finds Alaric alive.
Barely.
Now she has forty days to keep a ruined enemy breathing long enough to escape a forest built to kill them both. But the deeper Isolde searches for the truth behind his fall, the more she realizes his betrayal may not be what the court claimed, and saving the Lord Commander may pull her into a war that began long before either of them understood their parts in it.
A slow-burn romantic fantasy about enemies bound by survival, court betrayal, forbidden magic, and a woman who refuses to be anyone's sacrifice.