The Hunter and the Beast

She was sent into the dark to find a monster. What she found was something far more dangerous. Kael Draven. Dark-haired, golden-eyed, chained to a dungeon wall with shadows coiling across his skin like living things. The most feared man in the kingdom. Seventeen years imprisoned. Still smiling.

Lyra Valen is a hunter. The silver crescent burned into her sternum says so. Her honey- blonde hair, her steady blue eyes, her hand always near her blade - everything about her says she knows exactly what she's walking into. She doesn't. The bond that forms between them is supposed to be a leash. It has never been any of those things.

Deep in a dying forest, where ancient roots bleed darkness into the earth and something seven centuries old stirs beneath the stone, the truth comes for them both. The shadow spreading through the trees is not an outside force. It is a wound. A bond broken long ago and left to bleed - and it will keep bleeding until someone is willing to do what no one has managed in seven hundred years. Reach him. Not tame him. Reach him. Fire and shadow. Two halves of the oldest agreement the world ever made. She carries the flame. He carries the dark. And the people who have spent seven centuries keeping them apart are not finished yet. Fourteen days. One corrupted forest. A beast who was never a beast. And a hunter who always knew the difference.

*The Hunter and the Beast.*

Some bonds were never meant to be broken.