Ashgrave College gave Wren Calloway a full ride. It also gave her three men who know every move she makes before she makes it. Professor Silas Vane keeps a file. Dorian Ash keeps the tunnels. Cole Mercer keeps the photographs. Together they own the campus - and now they've decided to own her. When a student turns up dead with Wren's forged ID in his pocket, the three of them offer her a deal: their protection, their name, their bodies - in exchange for everything else. Wren says yes. Then she finds the fourth name on the contract. She came to Ashgrave to escape. She'll leave it with three men at her back and blood on her hands.

Mira crumbles the last of her dried wolfsbane into the mortar and counts what is left. *Five leaves left. Maybe enough for two more nights if she stretched the dosage thin.* Behind the thin wall, her brother Razvan coughs the way their mother coughed. Same rattle, same fever that never breaks, same too-bright eyes. Her mother died two years ago, just as the church bells began to ring for mass over Raven's Hollow. Mira has spent every day since apprenticed to the village hedge-witch, learning every herb that grows in the valley, and none of it touches what is eating her brother. The one plant that helps grows deep in the forest, past the boundary ward, past the iron stakes the village drove into the soil to mark where the beast's territory begins. So she crosses. What waits on the other side is a man who walks on four paws when he chooses to, bound to the trees and unable to leave them. Iancu tells her what nobody in the village ever did: her mother made a pact with the old powers and swore her firstborn would serve the forest, then ran, married a man, and had children anyway. *"The wasting sickness is the forest calling him home."* The silver pendant Mira has worn since childhood has grown into her skin. Tear it off and she bleeds out. It is one half of a locket that was broken in two, and the other half hangs at the throat of her aunt, Domnica Vornic, who stood in the doorway measuring how much broth her dying sister drank and how long she went between breaths, and who has worn that locket every day for fifteen years. Iancu is working against a clock of his own. Seven weeks until the blood moon crests the ridge. If the pact is not broken by then, he stays in wolf flesh. In the village, Sorin Cojocaru sleeps with a wolf-tooth necklace and his dreams of killing the beast. He has spent ten years learning to hunt the thing that clawed his father open, he has decided he is going to marry Mira, and he keeps turning up on the path she is trying not to be seen on. Her friend Leta Munteanu begs her to stay out of the trees. Then the pendant is torn from Mira's neck, and the seal on the curse comes off with it. *"You have until the blood moon. Bring me the pendant, and I'll let Razvan live."* A paranormal romance set in the Carpathians, with a cursed guardian, a healer who keeps walking back into the trees, an aunt with her own altar, and a village happy enough to try a woman for witchcraft. Two narrators: Mira in third person, Iancu in first. The romance is closed-door.

Tom Price is four years old and his face is going from blue to gray. Morwen Caldwell kneels beside him with a pouch of feverfew and tells his mother he will be all right, because that is what you tell a mother. She learned years ago that certainty was a medicine all its own. Then, through the open casement, on the wind coming off Black Hill, she hears her sister calling her name. By the time Morwen reaches the ring of standing stones the old people called the Fairy Circle, Ivy is already inside it. A pale, long-fingered hand comes through the shimmering air and closes on her wrist, and then the ring is empty. Nobody walks into the Court of Thorn and Dusk for nothing. The fae who took Ivy wears *a collar of thorns that touched his jaw*, and when Morwen comes after her sister he offers terms instead of an apology: *You're bound to my household until the year is complete, or until your sister is freed.* Rhys, the smith whose wife Elinor went through that same ring eight years ago, tells her she has just signed her life away. Morwen says she has bought three days. She goes through the hill as a healer, and her patient is Cethin Ashford. The Thorn Knight. The queen's son, collared by his own mother's magic, unable to die and unable to hold on to himself. *I've been alive for three hundred years, and I remember maybe fifty of them.* Above them both sits Queen Cyra, on a throne of interwoven thorn and bone, wearing a crown of living thorns that bite into her scalp. Beside her stands Eluned, who says *I keep a watch on everything* and who has her own view about which of the old blood should be sitting on that throne. And somewhere behind Cethin's silence is Emrys, the brother who was seventeen, arrested over forbidden texts from the queen's library, who spoke of a key and did not live to use it. There is also the thing Cethin has not told her, and when he finally does, it lands like a shove to the chest. *I know where Ivy is because I took her.* What follows is a mortal woman with dirt under her fingernails moving through a court that has never had a use for mortals: an iron nail pressed into her palm by a village woman, a bracelet of black thorns that will not come off, a man who says she is the first person in a hundred years who made him want to remember tomorrow, and a crown nobody knows how to remove without killing the wearer. Crown of Flame is a fae-court fantasy romance about sisters, bargains and curses, closed-door, ending in a garden in Ashbourne with an iron ring and a sky that is neither dawn nor dusk.

Niamh Connelly sits in a glass-ceilinged solarium and watches the curse climb her brother's body. *"Cillian didn't flinch. He hadn't flinched in three days."* First the toes, then the ankles, then the calves. Now his fingers. When it reaches his jaw she will be holding a conversation with a statue. Her own court will not help her. They say the stoneling curse is a punishment and that Cillian must have earned it. So Niamh takes an unsigned silver mask from the reject shelf at the back of the armoury, picks a lock she has only ever watched her brother pick, and steals a vial of midnight oil. At midnight she opens the Veil and steps through it alone. On the other side, the Flame Court is holding its Masquerade. Finn Maguire is at a forge in that court, hammering out a replica of a key he copied in wax when nobody was looking. He was seven when his father rode out with the Emberheart's escort. What came back was a body in the Veil passage, a missing relic, and a verdict: the blame settled on the dead man because somebody had to carry it. Finn has spent twenty years trying to prove the story wrong. Niamh gives him a false name. He hears straight through it. *"Your accent. You're from Shadowkeep."* What they make is a trade, not a friendship. She can move through a festival full of guards the way smoke moves. He knows a cave with a rusted iron door that his father showed him when he was six, and a dying man's instruction about where to look. She gets the Emberheart and uses it on her brother. Then she gives it back, and Finn uses it to clear a dead man's name. Neither of them has planned for what is actually inside the cave, or for what the relic does when it touches skin, or for what their two bloodlines turn out to have in common. And Lord Ronan Kearney, who has spent twenty years hunting the Emberheart and who had Finn's father killed over it, is sending a retrieval team through the Veil on the same night. A fae romantasy of two courts, a petrifying curse, and a relic that was never where anybody thought it was. The romance is closed-door, and the last page opens a door rather than shutting one.

Elowen Vane is nine years old, and the grey mist has spread from her collarbone to the hollow of her throat in branching veins like winter trees under the skin. She can hear. She cannot answer. Dorian Hatch has been the only healer in Thornwick for forty years and he has a cure in his back cabinet, third shelf, behind the foxglove. He will not use it. It is fae-touched, and the village council passed a decree. So Merry does what the women in her family have always done, and opens her grandmother's journal. The remedy inside is called the Milk of Sorrow: night-blooming heather, the heartwood of a thorn tree, and milk from a mother who has lost a child. The heather grows only in the Thorn King's private garden. The heartwood can only be cut by a Border Knight. Merry walks to the thorn border to ask, and is arrested for it. The knight who arrests her is Alistair Thornwood. He is not the king and does not pretend to be. The Thorn King is a withered thing on a throne who has not spoken in years, and the court has been quietly rotting around his silence ever since. The bargain, when it comes, is not offered by Alistair. It is offered by Morwenna, the Lady of Silver Lies, who wants two things: Merry's blood, to study, and Merry's eyes inside Alistair's confidence. In exchange, Elowen lives. Merry has two days and the Milk of Sorrow takes one to prepare. She says yes because there is nothing else to say. Alistair's answer to that is the closest thing to kindness anyone offers her all book: *"I want you to give Morwenna enough truth to satisfy her, while we work together to find a real cure for your sister."* What neither of them expects is what Merry's blood turns out to be. Her mother Lilith was half-fae. Merry is more than that, and when Morwenna touches the cut she flinches like she has been burned, because she recognises the line it came from. This is a book about a girl who bargains to save her sister and finds out she is the thing being bargained for. It ends in a dead December garden with one red rose blooming in the frost, warm to the touch, and two people who have both lost something permanent deciding to stay anyway. A fae fantasy romance of court politics, poisoned wine and blood inheritance, with a closed-door love story and a hard-won, bittersweet ending.

The trail to the game camera has been churned to mud by something heavy. Not a bear. Bears don't walk in straight lines with a measured, almost human stride, and they don't drag their left foot like it's injured or healing wrong. Lena Marchetti crouches and presses her fingers into the deepest print. Five toes. Claw marks at the tips. A stride that belongs to a tall person trying not to leave a trail and failing. The camera housing is twenty feet downhill, pried open, the lens gone. The memory card is still wedged in the slot; nobody thought to check. What's on the card is a burst of three shots, timestamped at 2:47 in the morning: a figure at the salt lick, then a hand reaching for it, then the hand mid-transition. *fingers elongating, knuckles thickening, dark fur pushing through the skin like needles through cloth* - with the flannel sleeve still on the arm. *"The Accord is a piece of paper," Ida says. "Paper doesn't stop what's already awake."* The tracks lead east, over the pencil line Lena's grandmother Ida drew on the county map, onto Holloway land, past a wire fence hung with faded signs: PRIVATE. KENNEL. BEWARE OF DOGS. Jace Holloway answers with a hammer in his hand and a dog named Brass at his heel. His brother Owen walked off this property three years ago and never came back. The sheriff filed it as voluntarily missing after Owen's truck turned up at the ferry terminal with the keys still in the ignition. And the woman standing at his fence is holding Owen's dogtag, which she found in the moss at the base of a fence post on her own land. The Marchettis and the Holloways have not spoken in a generation, and the letters locked in Lena's father's desk explain why. Dominic Marchetti was engaged to Elena Holloway. Then came a warning in sharp, angular letters: moon-touched bloodlines do not mix. Then Elena vanished. Thalia has been circling the Marchetti bloodline for years, and she has already taken Leo, Lena's twin, into her coven's inner circle with an initiation mark and a promise that he could be more powerful than anyone in the bloodline in generations. Lena's twelve-year-old sister Mira has been drinking something Leo gave her, and Thalia is happy to explain what it will do the first time the girl shifts. A closed-door shifter romantasy about two feuding families, a missing brother, and a woman who finds out what she is by tracking it through her own woods.

A single drop of blood, brown and dried, marks the corner of the envelope. Lydia Hartwell reads it by the hissing gas lamp with her back to the parlor door, because her father is out at the woodpile and the maid is busy with supper and she has recognised the handwriting. *The blood promise made seventeen years past falls due at the turn of the season. I require the willing bride as agreed.* When her father comes in, the burn across his right palm is fresh and blistered. He says he caught the kettle handle. The kettle is iron. He has been burning something else. In the room at the top of the stairs, Rosaline lies propped on three pillows in a room that smells of rosewater and sickness, too weak to lift a cup, saying out loud what the doctor will not: that something inside her is broken and willow bark is not going to fix it. She is the daughter who was promised, back when she was healthy and her mother was dying and a desperate man traded a name he thought he could outrun. So Lydia offers herself instead. At the forest edge at dusk she meets Gideon Ashford, and the bargain he actually sets out is not the one she braced for. Stay in the Ironwood for one month. If she is not willing at the end of it, the bond dissolves and she walks free. And if she is willing, the curse breaks, the forest lets him go, he becomes mortal, and he dies as he should have died long ago. The manor's servants watch her with an old grudge. There was a bride before her, and the journal in the drawer is written in Gideon's angular hand and begins *She betrayed me*. There is a locket with a dark-haired woman painted inside it. There is a hunter named Malachi Ashford who learned from that bride how to find the Beast and how to wound him, and who has never stopped trying. And there is the one thing Lydia wants and cannot ask for: Gideon's blood is the only cure left in the world for her sister, and every drop he gives away is a piece of the forest he cannot reclaim. A gothic beast romance about blood promises, forged contracts and a bride who would rather choose than be given. Closed-door.

The wolf pacing Lena Borden through the sword ferns is bigger than any wolf has a right to be, and she has been tracking the scar on its right foreleg for three days. She does not run. She plants her boots in the wet duff and lifts her hiking pole like a spear. Then the wolf shifts. Bone reshapes, fur recedes, and a man with silver eyes and a scarred brow tells her she is on his territory and has until nightfall to be gone. Lena has a laminated photograph in her jacket pocket. *Caleb Borden. He disappeared two years ago. The rangers called it a hiking accident.* Caleb is her twin. *He has our eyes,* she says. *We're twins.* A man in town with a crescent moon tattooed on his neck gave her one instruction: find the wolf with silver eyes and bring him something called the Moonstone, and she can have her brother back. That man is Tomas. Darius Stone has spent thirty years in the Cedarwood forest avoiding exactly this. No pack, no bonds, no one to bury. He knows what happened to Caleb, because he watched him walk willingly into Tomas's compound thinking he was getting a job, and said nothing. Every night since, he has fed Tomas information about pack movements and the whereabouts of other lone wolves. It is how he has stayed alive and how he has kept Tomas looking anywhere but here. Now Caleb's sister is standing in his clearing refusing to leave, and the wolf in his chest has already decided for him. *Mate, it whispered. Ours.* The full moon is three nights out. What follows runs along logging roads and under cabin floorboards: a journal in handwriting that is not his, a dented Zippo lighter passed hand to hand, and Garrett Ross, a local who offers to guide Lena to the loner's borders and whose brown eyes flicker gold when a howl rolls out of the trees. There is Will Torey, a scout too frightened to lie well, whose younger sister Rosalind is locked in a storage room behind the mill boiler because she was feeding him information. One shotgun, one knife, one injured spy, and a stone Tomas has been using to turn people into weapons. Lena did not come here to be rescued, and Darius has forgotten how to be anything but alone. Neither of them gets to keep that. A shifter romance with a lone-wolf hero, a mate bond neither lead asked for, and a rescue that costs both of them everything they were hiding behind. Closed-door.

Dawn should have brought mercy. Cordelia Ashford has not moved from her brother's bedside in six hours, and the tweezers have begun to shake in her fingers. The ivy threads she pulled out of Thomas's throat lie in a saucer on the nightstand, pale and slick, pulsing as though they might root in the porcelain by noon. The black veins have branched beneath his jaw. His bandaged hand leaks a thin gold sap that smells of crushed marigolds and something rotting underneath. The healer has fled. Margaret Holt fills the doorway in grey wool, a pinky finger missing from the hand she rests on the frame, and says what Cordelia already knows. *Still alive, then.* Barely. One name is left, and Cordelia has not spoken it aloud in three years: the boy who taught her to skip stones on the river, who kissed her once beneath the willow where the fireflies gathered, then walked into the Thornwood after his father's funeral and came back something else. Julian Blackwood receives her at a manor that rises out of the Thornwood like a broken ribcage, its table legs wrapped in ivy. The darkness clings to him and lags a half-second behind when he moves. His eyes are silver. A thick white scar crosses his throat, and it was her grandfather who gave it to him. *You came here expecting a villain, Miss Ashford,* he says. *But I'm just a man who was born into a broken pact, carrying a curse that isn't mine.* His price is a year of service: a year in which he can ask anything and she cannot refuse. What he offers back is not a cure. It is a single day, twenty-four hours in which Thomas will wake and speak and eat while the ivy holds still. And each day Julian pushes it back, the shade bound to his bloodline takes payment from him. A memory. A sensation. A piece of who he is. Mira has been collecting those pieces for a very long time. So has someone nearer to the Ashford hearth, who has been feeding the ivy for sixteen years and gave a finger to the Shadow Court for the privilege. Cordelia carries her father's blood in a sealed vial against her skin, and Alistair Finch has told her what it might buy. To break the binding she must spill Blackwood blood at the source in the Thornwood, and pay with her shadow, and her soul with it. Before the ivy is finished with either house she will tear a hole in the veil, and the question will stop being what the pact demands and start being what two people choose when nothing is forcing them: *Not by blood. Not by pact. Not because a curse binds us or because a shade demands tribute.* A gothic romantasy of blood-debts, cursed bloodlines and an old estate going green at the edges, closed-door, ending on bare hands in a garden.

She was supposed to be the instrument, not the accused. Four years of hearing the difference between a truth and a lie for a court that owns her, and all of it in exchange for hours shaved off her brother's sentence. Grey light bleeds through the slitted window high in Orla's cell and she is already lacing her boots when the guard's key scrapes the lock. She knows what it means before he says a word. The Night of Shifting Masks begins at dusk, and the king always clears his accounts before a celebration. Her cell holds nothing worth securing. A straw pallet. A chipped basin. A candle stub and the worn leather journal where she keeps Tobin's drawings. The corridors of Thornhollow twist through the mountain's bones like veins in a fist. Obsidian swallows the torchlight before it can travel three paces and the air tastes of cold stone and the mineral bite of the black lakes in the caverns below. Four years down here, and she still dreams about open sky. If she tells the truth, a man loses a father. If she lies and the court finds out later, they take her memories: Tobin's face, Tobin's laugh, the drawings pressed into her hands through the bars of a holding cell. They would take her brother's name out of her head and she would forget she ever had a reason to keep going. In the hall she sees the crack in a shadow that should not have one. And Drennan Ashvale, who wears no mask, not even tonight. Ink-black hair loose past his shoulders, silver at the temples, one eye where there should be two. *I require your presence at a private audience. You will come with me now.* What follows: a poisoned chalice, a prisoner in the deep, a shadow healer, a lord who vanished and the reason nobody will say his name, a midnight rendezvous, and a hunt through the caverns below. *I love your stubbornness and your courage and the way you look at the world like it owes you something.* The curse is still coiled in his chest at the end of this book. The socket still throbs. None of that changes the arrangement he has privately made with himself, which is that the next person to reach for what is his will not survive the reaching.

Port Carrow's harbour smells of salt and gunpowder and somebody's burnt sugar. Rosalind Darrow presses herself into the shadow of a stacked crate and counts the guards on the gangplank. Two, both in navy wool with silver lightning bolts stitched across the chest, both watching the crowd instead of the ship. She has timed it for the grand finale. The Council always saves its best for last. The ledger is in the captain's quarters, third drawer, behind a false bottom. She watched him lock it there three nights ago from the servant's passage with her palm flat against cold plaster. She paid a dockhand three silver marks to learn which door would be unlocked. The lock on the cabin takes her eleven seconds and a hairpin. Inside the ledger, written three times in the margins and underlined: *Ascension Plan.* Then the footsteps in the corridor, and the door, and a hand closing round her wrist like iron. Dashiell Marwick has storm-grey eyes and three pale duelling lines across the knuckles of his right hand, and Rosalind has seen that scar before, in the dark, on the night her parents died. He knows more than he should. He knows her uncle has been trying to marry her off for a year, that her brother Bram wants the Navy, that she runs a small operation out of her father's old warehouse. He also knows the thing she has never told anyone: that she can tell when a person is lying. *"I think we both want to know who killed our fathers."* Unlicensed magic, an affinity that belongs to no House, is the kind of thing the Council answers with iron cells beneath the Elemental Tower. Dashiell offers a tea house on Silver Street at noon instead, and the offer is not really an offer. What the ledger names is a plan financed through her own family's house, a temple, a date, and a requirement written down like a shopping list: one fire elemental, bloodline unbroken. Her cousin Sabine butters toast with the precision of a surgeon and has already arranged for Bram's acceptance letter to arrive. A closed-door romantasy of elemental houses and court politics, ending in a Council chamber where the woman who spent her life hiding what she was stands up and testifies.

Rain has not fallen on Millbrook in six weeks. The market square stews under a sky the color of old pewter, two hundred bodies packed between the clothier's stall and the council dais, and Eamon Reed reads the last name off the scroll. *"Sorcha Hartley."* Riona checked the registry herself yesterday and her sister's name was not on it. Eamon says Sorcha walked to the town hall and entered it at quarter to midnight, and that he watched her do it. Sorcha has had lung-fever for weeks. She coughs blood into her pillow every night. The tithe is one firstborn from Millbrook every seven years, and it is the price of the boundary wards, and the treaty has held a hundred and twelve years while three other border towns were swallowed by the thorn hedges. Riona offers seven years of her own service in her sister's place. The council refuses, and produces a parchment to explain why: Mara Hartley came to them the night before she died and had them witness a contract giving the fae her firstborn daughter's service in exchange for a healing. The healing failed. The contract did not. Two steps below an obsidian throne, the prince watches the same selections and hears what his father actually wants with a dying girl. *"The immortality ritual requires a vessel of fae-touched blood."* Connell has ruled for three hundred years, and every fae in his court owes him a debt or a favor or a secret. The wards on the castle are tied to his blood. The ritual does not simply take a life, it binds the court to him, so if his son removes him without first undoing those bindings, the castle collapses, the border wards fall, and Millbrook burns. Lorcan Grey has his own reasons. His mother was human. She came to this court when it took her sister, tried to negotiate, and was offered a trade: her voice for her sister's life. She took it, and lived seven more years without speaking. Her portrait lies facedown in the bottom drawer of his desk, and he can sit and stare at the back of the frame for seven minutes without touching it. What reaches Riona is a letter written in ink that seems to shift and breathe, three words long. *I can help.* This is a fae romantasy about a debt collected in children, a half-human prince standing at the right hand of the thing he wants to kill, and a woman who was promised away at seven and has never once agreed to it. The heat is closed-door.

Pearl-bright laughter cuts through the string quartet's latest waltz, and Morwenna Lark presses her gloved fingers against the stem of her champagne flute until the crystal warms. She finds him in the crush of masked nobility, near the eastern fountain where Lune and Nox's twin light spills through the stained-glass dome in intersecting beams of silver and violet. The Shadow envoy is wearing black velvet cut in the Silver fashion, a concession or perhaps a mockery, and his mask is simple obsidian, unadorned, which makes him impossible to lose in a sea of peacock feathers and gilded filigree. Drystan Vane. The name tastes like copper on her tongue. Lord Ashby's instructions had been precise. Midnight toast. Eastern alcove. He will have the Moontear Pendant in his coat, taken from the vault that morning, and if she exposes him the Lark name rises from the ash. It matters because her mother died screaming in the Misthollow borderlands and was found three days later with the Lark crest still warm against her chest. It matters because Aldric is sixteen, and wants the Silver Guard, and the only thing standing between her brother and a commission is a family name that has been rotting since the day that body came home. So she does it. She accuses a Shadow Court envoy in front of the entire Silver Court. He does not deny it. He spreads his arms and asks that the lady search him herself. *Go on, Lady Lark. Find what you're looking for.* Inside his coat there is a monogrammed silk handkerchief. Nothing else. A hundred people watch her pull it out because she has to. The pendant is real. It is simply not where she was told it would be, and when it finally hits the marble it has come out of somebody else's coat entirely. *You were given bad information, Lady Lark. The real thief planted the evidence on you, knowing you'd be desperate enough to use it.* By the time the laughing stops, Ashby is gone from the hall with her mother's pendant, Prince Caspian has found his evening's entertainment, and the man she just tried to ruin has told her something about how her mother actually died that she was never meant to hear. She has burned what was left of her family in one evening. The only person in either court willing to tell her what she was really being used for is the one she accused. This is a dark fae fantasy romance between two courts that have never trusted one another: an envoy in obsidian, a disgraced daughter with nothing left to lose, a border where light burns the wrong kind of blood, and a thing called the Gloomfeast that does not negotiate. The heat is closed door.

The vines writhe away from her palm like startled snakes. Rowena pulls back with a lacework of shallow cuts across her hand, blood welling in neat parallel lines. But where the thorns touched the faint thorn-shaped birthmark on her left wrist, they curled and blackened at the tips. She has never seen them do that for anyone. Three nights ago, fae riders came through Thornwall village on horses made of smoke and ember, laughing like breaking glass. They took six people. Her brother Bram was the last, swinging a blacksmith's hammer at a fae lord's head until somebody put an arrow through his shoulder, and Rowena watched all of it from the root cellar. Mira Greaves has survived sixty years on this border and lost a finger to a fae bargain. She tells Rowena what the birthmark means: the Thorn Curse answers to certain bloodlines, and hers is one of them. The same curse that is killing the crops. The same curse that put Old Man Harker in the ground with thorns growing out of his lungs. *If I'm not back by dawn.* *You won't be coming back at all.* Rowena presses the birthmark to the wall, and the thorns tear themselves off her skin, and she steps through into furnace heat, black stone pillars, and a floor of crushed bone. The man waiting on a horse of living ember is Dorian Flint, a thorn-hunter who tracks duskbloods across the Flame Court's border. His left hand is scarred and split, and something under the skin moves when the curse is close. What Rowena offers is a bargain. What she gets is a contract sealed with her own blood, a brother in a cell three floors down, a slow poison already in her, and a deadline. *The poison is slow. You have three days to find the unraveling pattern.* She is a village scholar who reads botanical treatises and ledgers, and she has been handed a dead language. Then there is Lord Croft, who led the raid, who traffics in people like her, and who wants something from her bloodline that no contract covers. A fae romantasy of cursed bloodlines and forced bargains: a thorn wall, a hostage brother, a poisoned clock, an old text nobody alive can read, and a line in it about what the curse costs to end. The romance is closed-door.