The Ferryman's Nest (The Miretide Vows #1)

Each book in this series features a different couple and a complete happily ever after.

She came to the Miretide for the dead. She didn't expect the living to be this much trouble.

Hester March is good with the dead. They stay where you put them. They don't bleed out in your arms the way the people you love do. She's traveled to the flood-channel settlement of Driftwake to identify bodies from a wrecked barge. Two weeks. No attachments.

Then the waters rise early.

By local rite, an unbonded woman cannot sleep in the dead-house once the flood lanterns are lit. Tovek — the village's night-ferryman, broad as a doorway, scarred, and known for rowing into channels even other orcs won't touch — offers her a uthra-vow: a practical shelter arrangement, nothing more. Warmth. A roof.

But Tovek's dominance isn't threats or titles. It's the fire already burning when she comes in from the cold. The food left where she'll find it. The way his scent — rainwood, river-mud, deep animal warmth — gets under her skin like a second conscience she cannot argue away. He lost his mate and child to flood season. His nest-room still has cradle-hooks in the ceiling. He has never taken them down.

Hester has buried two women she loved. She knows exactly what wanting a family costs. She has the wound catalogued, labeled, and filed.

She is still walking straight into it.

One flood season. Two people who made careers out of carrying grief.

How do you choose the living when you've only ever trusted the dead?