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Build your Hotlist lens⭐ Highly rated across the board
📊 Readers are divided — ratings range from 3.8 R.io to 4.5 AMZ to 4.5 GR
🔍 Still under the radar — fewer than 1,000 Goodreads reviews
During a festival celebration, a brooding castle guard with dangerous secrets finds himself irresistibly drawn to a healer condemned as a witch—and their connection ignites something neither of them can control or deny. Bound by duty to a throne that will never truly be his, Neirin has spent his life caging the darkness within, but Evera's defiance and fierce spirit unravels everything he's built to survive. As their fates become dangerously entangled, both must grapple with impossible choices: whether to risk everything for each other, embrace the power they've been forced to hide, or let the ghosts of their pasts tear them apart. This is a sweeping tale of two broken souls finding freedom and passion in each other, even as the world conspires to keep them bound.
Reading soundtrack
Dark, sensual, and raw—mixing gothic orchestral instrumentals with sultry R&B and industrial alternative. Capture forbidden tension, dangerous attraction, and the ache of impossible desire. Think Massive Attack, FKA twigs, and Cigarettes After Sex layered with ethereal, haunting strings.
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