Kiss the Monster

Tobias Wren walks into the forest above the mill village to pay his father's debt with the only currency the creature trades in: a memory. He doesn't expect to walk out alive. He does. He also walks out followed — by a shadow that never quite leaves the treeline, by a voice that knows his name before he says it, by something older than the valley and lonelier than he'll admit out loud. Ashvarr has been alone for four hundred years, because the last person who loved him died of it. He does not intend to be loved again. He intends to have Tobias near, nothing more, nothing he can be blamed for. But the village finds out. The priest, the hunter, and Tobias's uncle come with iron and fire. And on the church steps, in front of every man who ever called Tobias soft, Tobias stands still in front of the monster and chooses him anyway. An MM monster romance about the boy who was told he was too much, and the shadow who needed exactly that much.