Bonds Beyond Blood

A lush, brutal adult dark fantasy of deadly inheritances, found family, buried secrets, and an ancient bond to a king who does not believe in letting go.

She escaped the Ashen King. Now Amari needs to build a way to stay free.

Most of the empire doesn't know the powerful Stalva line has a daughter. Those who do know Amari as something precious: a beautiful noblewoman and a rare healer who should be protected.

They don't know her well.

After escaping the Ashen King, Amari joins Solaris, an elite military force that hunts those who abuse their supernatural inheritances. Her first squad is less than promising: a commoner leader desperate to prove he belongs, a volatile nobleman with a taste for violence, a gifted young man haunted by the team he lost, and an anxious scribe who has spent years being told she's worthless.

Amari sees what they can become, if they can survive each other first.

Their first assignment is already years too late. Thousands of women and children vanished across the empire. No bodies. Few useful records. And no explanation for why some disappear from crowded streets while others vanish from their beds. New victims pile up while Solaris races to understand what everyone else missed.

Amari came to Solaris for freedom. The investigation gives her people she wants beside her. She trains them, challenges them, heals what she can, and proves that being a healer has never meant being harmless.

But there is one thing Amari cannot heal away.

One glance bound her to the Ashen King through an inherent bond believed extinct for centuries. The empire calls such a connection a blessing. Amari knows a chain when she feels one. Distance only agitates it and the man never considered her escape the end of their story.

The closer Solaris comes to the missing, the more Amari has to lose. And every day she builds a life of her own is another day the Ashen King has to decide how long he is willing to let her keep it.

Find the missing. Keep her people alive. Stay free.