She was sent to kill him. She stayed to save him.
For thirty years, Rosalind has been the Iron Shadow, the empire's most feared assassin. At forty-six, she has buried more men than she can count. She knows every poison, every blind spot, every angle of attack. She knows how to disappear into a palace at midnight and leave only silence behind her.
Prince Adrian is her last contract.
He is thirty-two, the only living son of a murdered queen, and the empire's most inconvenient man. He speaks of peace. He dismisses his guards. He refuses to take up arms even when he knows the knives are coming for him. He is, by every measure of Rosalind's profession, the easiest mark she has ever been given.
She walks into his chambers with a blade in her hand and a contract in her blood.
He pours her a cup of tea.
What follows is not the kill the Council ordered. It is a confession, an unmasking, a long quiet conversation between two people who should be enemies and somehow are not. By morning, Rosalind has broken her contract, killed her own colleagues to protect a man she barely knows, and fled the capital with him into a world stranger and more brutal than she ever imagined.
The hunt that follows takes them through forgotten catacombs, into a hidden laboratory where the Council manufactures killers from the bodies of the unwilling, across frozen mountain peaks pursued by hunters who never sleep, and finally into the heart of an ancient sanctuary where the truth of the empire's bloody foundation has been buried for centuries. The deeper they go, the more Rosalind learns about who she really is, about the sister she thought was dead, about the mentor who shaped her, and about the bond between assassins and princes that the Council has worked for generations to erase.
But the empire does not let its instruments walk away quietly. The Council will send constructs of brass and steel, Nullifiers trained to kill those who threaten them, and finally the Emperor himself. And Rosalind, who has spent forty-six years learning how to take a life, must now learn something far harder. How to fight for one.
Reader advisory: This book is for readers aged eighteen and over. It contains explicit sexual content and graphic violence within a fantasy setting. All characters in sexual situations are consenting adults.
Pour something strong. Lock the door.
Come into the dark with Rosalind.
She knows the way out.
