Thorns of the Hollow Crown

She mapped his crime. He stole her certainty. Now their souls are bound-and the monster that devours memories is hunting them both. Enemies-to-Lovers • Forced Magical Bond • Morally Grey Royalty • Only One Bed • "I Would Burn the World For You"
Vesper Nox is the Crown's most dangerous star-mapper. She walks memories like other people walk streets-trauma-storms, joy-forests, the hollow absences where love used to live. Every map she charts costs her a piece of herself. She's already forgotten her mother's face. Her sister's voice. The color of her own happiness. She has one memory left to lose: the night her mentor died at the hands of Cassian Vane, the exiled prince who murdered his way out of the palace and into legend. When Vesper finally hunts him down, she doesn't find a killer. She finds bait. The creature that ate her sister's mind has been waiting for a star-mapper desperate enough to chase a ghost. Now Vesper and Cassian are bound by a Covenant Thread-a lifeline that shares pain, sensation, and, eventually, consciousness. Stray more than a hundred feet apart and both collapse. Sleep, and they dream each other's nightmares. Fight, and they feel every bruise twice. But the Thread has rules it didn't explain. Like how their memories are bleeding together-Vesper seeing his crime through his eyes, Cassian witnessing her sister's disappearance through hers. Like the memory neither of them lived, buried in the space where their minds touch, suggesting they were bound centuries before they ever met. And like the choice they'll face when they finally corner the Hollow: destroy it by merging completely into one consciousness, two souls in one body... ...or let it keep eating the world, and stay separate just long enough to watch each other die.
Perfect for fans of Fourth Wing, Crescent City, and From Blood and Ash-a standalone fantasy romance with series potential, featuring a heroine who saves the prince as often as he saves her, and a love story built on the geography of memory itself. Content Notes:High-stakes emotional intimacy, shared consciousness/sensation, past parental death (off-page), consensual romantic scenes, battle violence, themes of memory loss and identity.