A debt-reader. A feared Collector. Thirty-eight debts—and one magical bond that may kill them both.
She can read every debt written on a person’s skin. He carries thirty-eight that were never his. When one of them binds itself to her, neither can walk away unchanged.
Maren Locke has survived by keeping every account balanced and every person at a safe distance. As a debt-reader for Gravesend’s most powerful Ledger House, she can see the true cost hidden inside any bargain—and secretly alters the cruelest contracts before they destroy the people who signed them.
Silas Creed is the House’s feared Collector: a fighter with thirty-eight debts carved into his body. Most belong to strangers he chose to save. One is slowly killing him.
When a debt tears free during a near-fatal flare and brands itself onto Maren’s wrist, she becomes magically bound to the one man whose kindness she cannot calculate. To keep more marks from crossing—and keep Silas alive—they must uncover what is destabilizing his body and what the House concealed in the first bargain he signed at nineteen.
But Gravesend is a city where every favor carries a price, every promise can become a weapon, and powerful men never forgive an unpaid account.
Saving Silas may require Maren to trust the one thing she has never believed could exist: something freely given.
Debt Bonded is an adult fantasy romance featuring a forced magical bond, a fiercely competent guarded heroine, a protective and dangerously self-sacrificing hero, sharp banter, debt-based magic, found family, a three-legged dog with strong opinions, open-door intimacy, and a complete romantic ending.
Book 1 in a new interconnected fantasy-romance series.
