The Smiling Dark

THE SMILING DARK

Book One of Beautiful Ruin

Everyone in Cadryn loves Rynn. They love her warmth, her beauty, the way she lights up a room without even trying. What they don't know... what she's made sure they never will, is that underneath the smile is a woman who buried two sisters, survived eleven years alone before anyone came looking, and would burn the world down without blinking for the two people she has left.

She has a dragon for that. Nox... the only one of his kind seen in five hundred years, feared by everyone who isn't her, is bonded to her mind and her heart both, and he knows exactly what she is when the mask comes off. He's the only one who does.

When Cadryn burns and Rynn becomes the most hunted woman in the realm, the man who finds her isn't who he says he is. Alaric has a mission, a blood-curse eating him alive from the inside, and orders to deliver her to a king who wants her either captured or dead. What he doesn't have is any intention of walking away from her once he actually knows her, and by the time she realizes what he's hiding, it may already be too late to matter.

Across six kingdoms built on power, fear, and the things everyone agreed to forget, Rynn will have to decide how much of herself she's willing to become to protect what's hers. The realm calls her Touched. Her enemies call her a weapon. The people who love her call her kind.

They're all a little bit right, and all of them are missing the truth: she was never the one who needed saving.