The Shadow Court's Stolen Heir

Rain drips off the canvas awnings, and the mud between the cobblestones tries to steal her boots. Marguerite keeps her head down and lets the crowd flow around her. The Glimmering is the one night a year the border opens and Starlight Court merchants trade with humans under truce, which makes it the one night she has left, because the apothecaries in the mortal quarter have failed her four times now and her sister is in a boarding house burning with fever and coughing blood. Her coin purse is empty. The silver locket in the herb merchant's second drawer is worth two bundles of feverfew and perhaps a vial of moonpetal essence. She has been light-fingered since she was twelve, since the fire took her parents and the cottage. Her hand is steady. Three breaths, four, and no shout behind her. Then she opens the locket in the alley and finds the crest inside the clasp: a crescent moon pierced by a dagger. The same mark that was burned into her parents' doorframe the night they died. Two Starlight Court fae find her before she can get rid of it, and then their lord does. Dorian Blackwood stops three feet away, close enough that she can smell rain and cedar, and he explains her situation to her without once telling a lie, because he cannot. A key has been stolen. The key unlocks a prison holding a Shadow Court general. If it is used, the border war becomes an invasion, and everyone she knows in Thornwall dies. The offer is a trade. Find the key, and he clears her of the theft and takes her to the only person alive who can lift what has been done to her sister, because Lily is not sick. Lily was cursed, deliberately, and the counter-curse has a price Dorian cannot pay without leverage. He gives her a silver whistle shaped like a crescent moon and the name of a fence who last had the key. What Marguerite does not know is why the Shadow Court wants her, what her sister is carrying, or what she will learn about her own blood and Dorian's before the two courts are finished with them. A fae romantasy of bargains that cannot be refused: a pickpocket with sight, a cursed child, a stolen key, a queen who collects leverage, and a court where every thread leads to a spider. The romance is closed-door.