Nola is the healer people whisper about when everything else has failed.

She cures what the Guild won't touch, treats people who cannot pay,

and practices magic the Empire punishes by burning, because it works

without the blood tithes the Empire is built on. She's survived long

enough to know that saving the wrong person can get you killed.

And through all of it, she's raised a teenage son alone: seventeen

cities, twelve names, and years of teaching him to sleep with his

boots on.

Then the Iron Hand of the Empire walks through her door carrying his

dying daughter.

General Soren Draven has survived wars, dragons, treason, and raising

a child alone. And twenty years ago, Nola told him she had never loved

him.

Briar is thirteen, black veins crawling up her throat, and every legal

healer in the Empire has already refused to touch her.

Nola takes one look and knows exactly what is killing the girl.

She was married to it.

But saving Briar means binding herself to Soren by blood. No walls. No

privacy. Nowhere to hide twenty years of anger, memory, regret… and

the inconvenient fact that neither of them is nearly as finished with

the other as they should be.

It means forged papers and shared rooms. Crossing the Empire as a

family with two teenagers whose forbidden magic is getting harder to

hide.

And at the end of the road is the husband she escaped: the man who

spent years teaching one of the most gifted healers of her generation

to make herself smaller.

He never considered what would happen when she stopped.