The Vicious Flame King

Sewer water laps at Sorcha's knees, warm and foul, thick with things she refuses to name. She presses her back against the damp stone and counts the guard patrols above. Three sets of boots crossing the grate, pause, cross again. Standard rotation. Every fifteen minutes, a one-minute gap. That gap is the whole plan. Above her is the court vault, three doors deep behind the throne room, and inside it a fire-stone key the size of her hand, roughly cut, deep orange and pulsing faintly as if it has a heartbeat. The locksmith's apprentice had been boastful about the new mechanism. Royal blood, he had said. *Burn anyone else to cinders.* Sorcha Vance is not royal blood. The court tested her for fire-magic when she was nine, pressed a branding iron into her palm, and got no spark out of her at all. She has been scraping her thumbnail across that scar ever since. She needs the stone anyway. Her brother Liam is in the dungeons because Tarquin Aldaine put him there, and a drainer in the Warrens will sell her his location for exactly one thing. Her lockpicks were filed by a man who owed Liam a life-debt. She has not seen her brother in six months. So she takes the key. Her palm blisters and blackens in seconds. Her fingers will not open. She makes a sound she has never made before. And then she is still alive, standing on a clean stone floor she should be a pile of ash on, and that is the part that changes everything. Her way out runs across the courtyard. Mira Vance is there among the silk and velvet with gems braided into her blonde hair, and their eyes meet, and Mira's mouth curves into a slow knowing thing before she leans toward the guard beside her and whispers. At the gate a man steps out of the shadows with his hand already on his sword and eyes the exact gold of the stone burning a hole in her pocket. Ronan Drakos can feel it. He says it calls to his blood. Then he says the part nobody else in that courtyard has worked out. *You should be dead.* This is a fantasy romance set in a court that decides when you are nine years old whether you are worth anything: a thief with a ruined hand and a brother in a cell, a prince wearing the same face he has worn since childhood, a rival who is far worse than an executioner, and a stone that declined to kill the one person it should have. The heat is closed door.