Bound By Fire

She has spent twenty years telling herself
the warmth that rises in her hands is stress, poor wiring, old grief.
The Kindler Reliquary sat in its museum case and pulsed when she touched the glass.

The man who came for it that night moved like violence kept by choice in reserve.
He was not the danger she expected.
The fire she carried was.

Lena Ashford has built her entire professional life around not asking certain questions too closely. As an acquisitions consultant for the Halewick Arts Foundation, she knows which collectors lie about provenance, which politicians launder reputations at charity galas, and which antiques sit too quietly in their cases the way an animal sits when it knows every exit. She has also spent twenty years making explanations fit things they have no business covering: candle flames that rise during arguments, mirrors that crack under her fingertips, glass that steams in her hands when she is afraid.

Her mother always had an explanation ready. Lena stopped asking why the explanations felt like doors being locked from the outside.
The night the Kindler Reliquary arrives at the Halewick Museum, Lena touches its display case and warmth pulses back through her palm. She tells herself it is faulty lighting. Then nerves. Then the reliquary is stolen before dawn, and the man responsible moves through her professional life with the controlled precision of someone who has spent years doing things that cannot be explained by official channels.

Damian Joss is the head of an old supernatural house operating beneath Halewicks surface. He is not the villain. He is also not clean. He has blood on his ledgers and a family history that makes Lenas suppressed fire inheritance look like a parlor trick. What he is not and the book earns this carefully, one honest choice at a time is the man who decides what Lena Ashford is before she does.
The Ember Court beneath Halewick is fracturing. An old flame inheritance has been surfacing in unexpected bloodlines. Someone is burning the evidence. The reliquary is not what the insurance documents said, and the fire Lena has been suppressing since she was seven years old is not the danger she was raised to believe it was.
For readers who want their paranormal romance heroines given the full history their mothers were too frightened to leave them, their supernatural heroes stripped of comfortable authority and made to earn trust in full view of the damage they have done, and their slow burns built on fire that belongs to both of them only when both of them choose it.

A paranormal romance. For adult readers. Contains themes of suppressed heritage, institutional deception, and the specific grief of a childhood spent being taught to fear yourself.