What the Tide Keeps

She's the monster. He's the one her song can't touch. The kill that should have ended him bound them instead.

Three generations after the sea rose and swallowed the world, humanity survives on causeways strung above black water - and Sereth hunts them. War-singer of Cathedral Deep, thirty-one knights on her ledger, the highest bounty on the western High Roads. She doesn't apologize for her kills. She sings them. That's more than the knights do for hers.

Then an order convoy takes Ylla - a fledgling, barely grown, captured alive. Live capture is new. Live capture is wrong. And when Sereth defies her court to hunt the convoy down, she meets the one thing worse than a bell-line: a scarred causeway rider her song simply... fails against.

Rook doesn't carry living cargo. So when he learns the sealed crate on his manifest holds a child, his contract is already broken - he just doesn't know yet that the siren stalking his convoy will hit him with a kill-song that should stop his heart between beats.

It doesn't kill him. It binds them. Two enemies, one shared nervous system, and a rescue neither can finish alone - across drowned cathedrals, past everything the knight-orders don't want found, into a fortress built to unmake her voice. He'll break every rule he has. She'll lose everything she loves. And what they find in the chapterhouse cells will unravel the official history of the drowned world.

Enemies to lovers. Fated mates. Forced proximity. Touch her and die. She's the monster - and she is never once sorry.

Adult dark romantasy. Open-door, slow burn. Book One of a completed trilogy with a guaranteed HEA - for readers of Carissa Broadbent and The Witcher who always rooted for the thing in the water.