The Forbidden Shadow Bride

*You should not be here, little mortal.* Madeline Ashworth is seven years old, barefoot, pressed flat against the drawing-room wall of Ashworth Manor with the velvet fringe of the curtain in her fists, and the tall woman standing at the fireplace has already seen her. *Bargains require witnesses.* Her father is a clockmaker whose steady hands are shaking against his own desk. What he is bargaining for is a circlet of black metal, twisted branches and thorns, no gold, no jewels, nothing pretty. What he has already traded away is his three-year-old daughter. *Break it, and the throne opens. A new ruler may claim it.* Twelve years on there is a sound at the cottage door that is not quite a knock, and the oak tree in the lane has turned silver and stopped moving. The emissary on the step wears a thorn-shaped pin at his collar and carries a scroll sealed with black wax. *Elodie Ashworth, second daughter, of age eighteen. The Court of Shadow and Ruin claims her service for one year and one day.* Madeline knows what one year and one day does to people. Elodie's friend came home unable to remember her own mother's face, sat in the corner of the tavern for three months, and walked into the river. So Madeline offers to go instead. What waits on the other side is Silas Croft, holding a throne through a crown that was never his and a court that is quietly coming apart. The Ruin eats walls and halls and courtiers. It feeds on broken vows. And Silas will not let Madeline leave, or send one letter home. *Your grandmother was the Regent of the Court of Shadow and Ruin.* That turns the Broken Crown etched into her father's signet ring from a decoration into an inheritance, and turns Madeline's blood into the only thing that can wake an object called the Heart of Night, hidden in a London house she was born in. The Ruin is not a blight. It is a cage. And there is something inside it that can hear its own name spoken. After that come a crypt full of her family's bones, a beast that leaves a mark and a message behind, a knight who has been guarding her for a reason he never once said out loud, and Cordelia Vane carrying the Heart toward a prison she means to feed rather than break. It finishes with a mortal woman setting a broken crown on her own head in front of a hall of fae who do not want her there, and saying so plainly. *I am not asking for your permission.* This is a fae court romantasy of bargains and bloodlines: a sister traded for a sister, a debt seven generations deep, a court rotting from the inside, and two people who end the book holding far less power than they began it with. The romance is closed-door.