The Iron Vow

Verrin Osgar is the free cities' best assassin, and she has one rule: never take a contract on a woman she might have to look at. Then the guild puts a bounty on the Blackwood Witch, and Verrin throws the rule out. What she doesn't expect is to find Cass Alderay already expecting her — poison on the table, second chair pulled out, ledger open to the page with Verrin's own master's name on it. Their truce is not friendship. It's arithmetic. Three weeks, split the work, split the coin, sleep with knives on opposite sides of the bed. But arithmetic has a way of turning into something else when you break into vaults together and stitch each other's wounds by candlelight. When Verrin's real contract comes due — the Witch, dead, or her own head on a spike — she burns the instructions. She burns the guild. She keeps the Witch. Neither woman says the word love. They don't have to.