First book in The Ever Spirits series.
A magic dagger. A beautiful boy. And me.
We were a match made to be destroyed.
*
The dagger lured me in with whispers: I was meant to be an empress, not a farm girl, simple, sequestered and common.
Daring to dream of power and love, I picked the dagger up.
And I reached for him.
Avid and ardent, we were both vicious in strength and feral at heart. But he protected those he loved while I—heedless, rash, slapdash with my emotions—played carelessly with the lives and hearts around me.
But others played better.
My country’s overlord kidnapped my family and forced me into a charade: be a decoy princess to protect his queen.
My weapons trainer hid his true agenda as he taught me to fight with sword and dagger, to identify poisons, to ingest them, and to sever my soul.
Even the spirit of the man I loved suppressed a secret savagery behind his charm.
But his spirit, split from his body, was no equal for his physical form. Captured by the enemy and warped into an atrocity, his true self made our love a battlefield… strewn with a thousand downfalls… one for every time I defied him.
Battlefield
He lounges in the shadows that embrace him, his long legs clad in leather and stretched out across the rock floor. Crossed at the ankles, his boots flicker faintly from moonlight leaking in and reflecting off the crystals in the cavern walls.
“Are you sure you want to do this, my tormented queen?”
His question vibrates through the air like the lax purr of a predator. It makes the space around me shiver as his timbre slinks near, alongside the scents of leather and damp stone and my own sweat.
I hunker inward, hugging my knees in a moonbeam slanting through a thin rift in the rock ceiling. My breath emerges visibly, like a rising wraith in the glacial darkness. I school my features into nothingness—no reaction to him at all—because self-lies provide the only defense.
He shifts position, the motion indulgently relaxed. “You sure you want to relive when you were young and hopeful?”
“You were young and hopeful, too.”
“At the beginning of a story, everyone is young and hopeful.” A sneer twists his shadowed lips. “Bloated with heroic sentiments.”
I force my fingers to remain slack. “And at the end, there’s only survival.”
His low but edged chuckle rumbles with heat through my flesh. “Is that what you call what you did with me? Surviving?”
“What else?”
His smile spreads palpably in the dark, because I know the answer. He doesn’t even have to speak it.
For shame, Alynah, he mocks directly in my head.
My mind was always his to enter, ever since he stole the part of my soul that gave him the key to get inside me forever.
I lift my chin, defiant, and stab back. Should I be ashamed?
His grin splits his face like malice. My poison queen.
Not yours.
Are you poison for anyone else?
I’m still so heedless, always stumbling in his games. At thirty-three years old, I should be better.
But people flounder at any age, and I am worn thin, worn down, my resistance worn away. I feel as knobbled and ancient as the souls soldered to the rock around us.
Those trapped spirits are listening now. I’ve been silent too long, and the fates of so many aboveground, both living and those about to be born, rely on me to fix this.
I’m already lost in so many ways, but I can save the rest.
Swallowing, I return to the past, when a magic dagger embroiled me in enchantment, and a beautiful boy ensnared me without even giving me his name.
He was my kindred soul.
Avid and ardent, we’d strained against the ribcages of our flesh as we sought to grasp impossible things.
Before our love became a battlefield and my life became a lie.
Find it on your favorite retailer here.
Sonya Lano 