The Lorewarden's Captive (The Blackbark Testaments #1)
Kora Valeka
Each book in this series features a different couple and a complete happily ever after.
She came to steal a tablet. She didn't plan to get caught.
Sabine has lived under a dead woman's name for seven years. She enters the Blackbark archive-city with one objective: steal the lineage proof that will stop her half-brother's execution. She expects resistance. She does not expect that the blood-ledger lorewarden will scent her forgery before she clears the gate arch.
Ozul does not announce what he knows. He locks her inside his record house under formal inquiry — because the living resin answers to her fingertips in ways it should not, and his body has already made its claim without consulting his considerable judgment.
Confinement becomes negotiation. Every truth Sabine surrenders makes her more legally claimable and more politically explosive. And then breeding heat strikes inside the Blackbark's resin-dense halls — the forest begins recording what they are whether they consent to documentation or not.
He is the most dangerous kind of patient. She is the most dangerous kind of desperate.
The fated mating bond does not wait for them to finish arguing about whether it's allowed.
In a world where the archive records every false name, is there any version of survival that doesn't require becoming the pair the law was written to prevent?
