The Hollow Prince

He has ruled Asterfell for eleven years without a crown.
The Heartstone will not accept a divided soul.
His soul has been divided since the night of the Black Winter ritual.
The healer who arrived in his court does not know this.
She does not know she was sent to witness something
that should have been impossible to survive.
She is beginning to understand why he did not.

Prince Elias rules Asterfell as regent from beneath an unfinished crown arch not king, never king, because the Covenant of the Whole Soul has held since before the palace was built: the Heartstone will not accept a sovereign bond from a divided soul.

Elias has worn a circlet instead of a crown for eleven years, governing with complete precision and the specific grief of a man who knows exactly what was taken from him and cannot restore it without the very thing that was used to divide him.
His court has learned to bow with loyalty in their knees and calculation in their eyes.

Isla arrives at Blackthorn Keep as a court healer, sent through channels that do not bear too much examination, to treat a spreading affliction that palace records call a residual curse from old border magic. She has excellent clinical instincts, a gift for reading what patients will not say aloud, and a complete unwillingness to accept official explanations that do not account for all available symptoms. The hollow in Eliass chest is not metaphor. The Heartstone holds a piece of him in the chamber below the palace. He has spent eleven years learning to function around the absence of it.
Isla notices the function. She notices the absence more.

The Black Winter ritual did not fail. It was completed by the wrong people for the wrong reasons, and the faction that used it is still inside the palace, still maintaining the Heartstones claim on Eliass soul, still preventing the Covenants completion because a prince without a whole soul cannot bind the kingdom to himself and cannot remove the people who benefit from the arrangement.

For readers who want their cursed ruler romances built on the specific horror of having part of yourself held hostage by the institution meant to protect you, their healer heroines given diagnostic intelligence equal to the supernatural complexity they walk into, their princes allowed to be afraid without being weak and their endings built on wholeness chosen, not restored by force.

Standalone dark paranormal romance. For adult readers. Contains themes of soul-division magic, institutional betrayal, and the long aftermath of surviving something that was not meant to be survived.