Ember and Ash

She Was Born With Nothing

She was born with nothing. She survived on silence, shadow, and a blade kept sharp out of necessity. But the night Lyra Nox pressed her hand to a dying noble's ring and felt his magic pour into her veins, everything she thought she knew about herself and the world built to keep her powerless began to burn.

A City Built on Blood and Power

In a city stratified by bloodlines, Nulls like Lyra are ghosts: invisible, exploitable, and utterly expendable. Raised by the ruthless Mistress Mira Voss in the labyrinthine undercity, Lyra has spent her life honing the only tools available to someone born without magic: her instincts, her knives, and her ability to disappear. She is the guild's finest assassin. She is also, supposedly, powerless.

The Night Everything Changed

That changes the night a routine job goes catastrophically wrong. Lord Halden is dead, but Lyra didn't just kill him. She drained him, stripped the magic from his blood, and left him hollow as a husk. Now his power lives inside her, feral and hungry, clawing at her bones and threatening to spill out at the worst possible moment. Nulls aren't supposed to survive contact with noble blood. They certainly aren't supposed to steal it. If the ruling Houses discover what she's become, they won't just hunt her. They'll dissect her.

The Burning Heir

Far above, in the marble towers of House Draven, Kael Draven feels the void the moment it opens. The Burning Heir, so named for the wild, corrupted magic that has tormented him since childhood, has spent his life in exquisite pain, kept upright by pride, duty, and the quiet terror that he is slowly being destroyed from the inside. When the disturbance in the city's magical current leads him to a woman who shouldn't exist, he expects a threat. He doesn't expect to feel, for the first time in years, something close to relief.

Enemies, Fate, and Forbidden Power

Lyra and Kael are everything the city has designed them to be: enemies, tools, symbols of a system built on oppression. But the closer they are drawn together, by necessity, by the terrifying pull of stolen power, by the slow, devastating realization that each sees the other more clearly than anyone else ever has, the more dangerous the world between them becomes. Because Lyra's magic is growing. And Kael's secrets run deeper than even he knows.

When the City Begins to Burn

When a conspiracy at the heart of the ruling Houses threatens to unmake the city entirely, Lyra must choose between the life she's survived and the power she never asked for. And Kael must decide whether the fire in his veins, and the woman who might be the only person in the world who can withstand it, is worth everything he was raised to protect.

For Readers Who Crave Dark Romantasy

For fans of From Blood and Ash, A Court of Thorns and Roses, and The Cruel Prince.

A vow carved in ember. A love built in ruins. And a power that was never meant to be hers, until it was the only thing standing between them and the dark.