Wren Ashcombe has hated the Nocthral since she was twelve years old and watched a Tithe collector drain the color from her mother's face and call it fair trade. She's spent her whole life keeping her head down, her tithe paid, and her little brother alive.

She failed at the last one.

When an Unbound wolf slips through the failing Veilwall and takes Rennick from her, Wren does the one thing she swore she never would: she walks to Thornmere and enlists in the Bonding Trials, where commoners are broken, bonded, or buried in pursuit of a Duskhound of their own. She doesn't want glory. She wants a wolf big enough to hunt down every Unbound left breathing.

She doesn't expect her wolf to bond silent. She doesn't expect the Trials' most brutal, unreadable instructor to notice her. And she certainly doesn't expect to catch him somewhere he shouldn't be, asking questions no royal envoy has any business asking — because "Instructor Vane" is not who he says he is.

Crown Prince Kael Vaelisk has spent a year investigating a rot in his own court's ledgers: Tithe collections that don't match Wall reports, Wardens whose bonds are failing at a rate someone is working very hard to hide. Posing as a nameless instructor was supposed to get him answers. It was not supposed to get him a recruit who looks at him like he's something to be endured rather than obeyed — the first honest thing anyone's said to him in Thornmere in years.

As the Trials push Wren toward a truth that could burn the Accord to the ground, and push Kael toward a decision that could cost him his crown, the wall between them — built on two hundred years of blood, blame, and unequal ledgers — gets harder to defend with every training bout, every shared watch on the Wall, every moment neither of them walks away when they should.

The Veilwall is thinning. Someone wants it that way. And the prince Wren was trained to distrust may be the only one standing between her and a war neither of them chose.

Tropes: Enemies-to-lovers · Forced proximity · Secret identity · Slow burn · Found family · Chosen-one bond