The Tidepainter's Claim (The Miretide Vows #2)
Kora Valeka
Each book in this series features a different couple and a complete happily ever after.
She's spent three years making herself invisible. He paints people where everyone can see them.
Iva Sorrel is very good at disappearing. After a charting error killed her brother and her guild used her grief to quietly erase her, she's learned the rules: take the restoration work, fix the damage, leave before anyone looks too closely. She arrives in the reef-ring settlement of Brineshell expecting scaffolding and silence.
She gets Mavrek.
Brineshell's ritual tidepainter is enormous, ink-handed, and indecently certain. His job is to mark chosen mates in salt-oils and clan motifs before the entire community — so no one can mistake her for a secret, a shame, or a passing appetite. He looks at Iva like something worth making permanent.
The problem: Mavrek will not love privately. He watched his human mother be loved quietly and honored nowhere, and he vowed he would never keep a woman's name out of his mouth in public. Iva can handle desire in the dark. She cannot handle reverence in daylight.
Pigment-stained hands. Scent-rich oils. Praise she doesn't know how to survive. And then her old guild arrives, ready to fold her back into useful invisibility — back into the quiet erasure she's been calling safety.
She has to decide: stay hidden, or step into the light — not because she's cornered, but because she refuses to give the people who erased her the last word.
What does it cost to finally let someone paint you where the whole world can see?
