The Last Kindled

Wilder Kessler's parents died in a fire seventeen years ago, and the Crown Tribunal taught him exactly what to do with anyone who carries flame in their blood: capture it, cage it, hand it over. He's spent his life hunting the fire-touched with a huntsman's cold precision, until the fugitive under his ropes turns out to be a woman named Ren, bound to a tether-shard that answers to no one, least of all the men who want to burn it out of her. He should deliver her to Hollow Creek and collect his bounty. Instead, a long road, one shared fire a night, and a bond neither of them chose start unraveling everything he thought he understood about the flames that took his family, and about the woman he was supposed to be delivering to her death. Ren has spent her life running from what the shard wants and what the Tribunal fears. She knows better than to trust the huntsman walking beside her with a rope he's stopped tightening. But when old enemies close in and the truth about Massacre Hill comes to light, Ren and Wilder discover the choice in front of them was never about capture at all. It's about which of them is brave enough to choose the other, freely, before the fire finds them both. A slow-burn, forced-proximity romantasy about the bonds we're given and the ones we choose, for readers who love enemies-to-lovers tension, a hero raised to hate what she is, and a heroine who refuses to be anyone's cage.