Three rules keep a memory thief alive.
Rule #1: Don't touch skin.
Rule #2: Don't look too long.
Rule #3: Don't let them see what you really are.
Tonight, I'm breaking all three.
Kira Shadowmere is the best memory thief in Vespera—a city where memories are bottled, sold, and craved like a drug, and the people they're stolen from are left to rot. One touch, one pull, thirty seconds: she can lift the worst night of your life right out of your head. The Guild pays in silver. Her conscience pays in everything else.
But memory thieves don't live past twenty-four, and tomorrow is her birthday.
Tonight's job should take thirty seconds. Instead, it binds her—soul-deep, unbreakable, sever it and they both die—to Lysander Winterbourne: the last son of a slaughtered house, the lord who executes thieves like her, and the only person in the world whose presence quiets the curse that's been drowning her since she was three years old.
She should run. He should kill her. Neither of them does the smart thing.
Now the Guild's master wants her caged, a power no Null should have is waking in her blood, and the deeper Kira digs, the clearer the truth becomes: she isn't the only memory thief in this story. Someone has been inside her head. Someone has been editing. And what they took will cost her the only family she has left.
WINTERBOURNE is enemies-to-lovers romantasy with teeth. A heroine who flirts with a knife in her hand. A cold lord who is never afraid, only furious. A soul-bond with a body count. A slow burn that detonates. And an HEA that costs exactly what it should.
You'll love this if you want:
- Touch her and die
- A thief heroine who steals the wrong thing
- Enemies-to-lovers, forced proximity
- Found family who'd bury bodies for each other
- Morally gray everyone
- A final line you'll message me about in all caps
- ~110,000 words
- Standalone
For readers of Fourth Wing, Quicksilver, and The Serpent and the Wings of Night.
