Hunted by the Nightshade Court

Two guards in black enameled armor step into her path. *"Human women don't enter the court uninvited,"* the taller one says. Rowena Banfield pulls off her right glove instead of answering. The scar across her palm catches the candlelight, a jagged line from a binding ritual that had failed. At the far end of the Nightshade Court's throne room, on a seat carved from what looks like petrified bone, Corin Ashvale watches her come. Silver-white hair past his shoulders. One eye pale gray, one black as a dead star. Her sister Nessa is turning to stone from the inside out. The Bone Curse takes seven days, and Rowena has come to accuse the king she is certain cast it. He does not deny what he is. *"I am a king, Miss Banfield. And your sister's curse is not my doing."* What he admits instead is worse. The Bone Anchor is missing, and whoever holds it can shape curses of bone and blood without the usual limitations. Rowena knows the Anchor from her father's journal, where he wrote that it was forged from the spine of the first fae king and bound to the Nightshade throne. Corin knows her father by reputation. *"Your father was a thief."* The accusation turns into a bargain and the bargain into something neither of them planned for. They ride north toward the iron mines, a stolen comb warm in her pocket, something in the shadows keeping pace just beyond the gaslight. In a cold alley behind a tavern, bruised and bleeding, Corin holds out his hand palm up and offers the only word he has for it. Partners. The theft runs deeper into his own house than he wants to believe. Dorian Ashvale helped steal the Bone Anchor, handed over his own cousin, and started a war. The man holding the Anchor now walks alone with a silver brooch gleaming and a smile that doesn't reach his eyes, and the Thorn Edict means Rowena cannot kill Varen without forfeiting herself. She can hurt him. It will have to be enough. Behind all of it sits a human king, Harald Thornwood, who burned the old groves a generation ago and has not stopped wanting what the fae keep. It ends in a hall of elders who have spent centuries hoarding power and fearing change, with a human woman telling them plainly that she has not come to steal a throne, and a king lifting the circlet off his own brow and setting it on the obsidian table. *"I won't be a king who chooses tradition over love."* A closed-door fae romance of curses, court politics and a sister worth burning a kingdom for.