The Grave-Scribe's Bargain (The Blackbark Testaments #2)
Kora Valeka
She had two days and one job. She was not supposed to feel anything.
Maren is a professional mourning singer — expert at performing grief she does not feel, giving every room the version of herself it wants most. She's arrived in the Blackbark's funerary quarter with a blackmail bargain: deliver a location, or her sister dies. Two days. Then leave before anyone scents anything wrong.
Heskul is the grave-scribe. The iron scars across his forearms came from years in human chains as a war-prisoner. He knows what a justified cage looks like from the inside. When he catches fear and falsehood beneath Maren's ash perfumes — and something devastating underneath both — he doesn't expose her. He confines her to the gravehouse instead.
The more carefully he tends her, the worse she feels about the mission she hasn't yet abandoned. Her handlers still hold her sister. And the fated mating bond is asking her to burn her only leverage and trust a man whose one unforgivable sin is betrayal.
She will have to tell him everything. Mean it. And be right about what he does next.
In a world where the resin records every performance, what happens when the only person who wants the real you is the one you were sent to betray?
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