THE WEIGHT OF MERCY

Some patients don't want to be saved. Some healers refuse to accept that as an answer.

Maren Callow has spent three years running a free clinic in the lower city, treating anyone the citadel's grander physicians overlook, and burying more patients than she cares to count. She has never turned away a dying man — but she has also never treated one quite like this: a fae lord bleeding onto her floor at midnight, cursed by a magic older and stranger than anything in her training, and utterly convinced he is beyond saving.

Lord Alaric Thorne has spent a decade staying neutral in a succession war he never wanted, and it has cost him everything — his health, his standing, and very nearly his life. He expects to die quietly, without an audience. He does not expect the healer treating him to refuse his diagnosis, refuse his fatalism, and refuse to let him go without a fight.

As Maren uncovers the true shape of the curse — one tangled inseparably with a dying king's decade of avoided choices — she and Alaric are drawn into a fight considerably larger than either of them intended: a fight for his life, for a court on the edge of collapse, and for a mercy neither of them expected to find in the middle of it.

The Weight of Mercy is Book Three in the Ironbound Court series — a high-heat, standalone romantasy of enemies circumstance made, slow-burn devotion, and a stubborn human healer who refuses to accept that some things simply can't be cured. Contains explicit content intended for adult readers.