I was raised to hide my fire. He was exiled for controlling his.

I've spent my whole life disappearing — burying my grief, burying the pendant my mother begged me never to remove, burying the feeling that I was never meant for the ordinary life I built. Then the attack came. It wasn't random. It wasn't human. And the male who saved me burned with a power I have no name for.

Kael has kept his brothers alive since their father's death by keeping secrets — including the real reason the Fireborn were exiled from Solvane. He doesn't have room for a human woman who asks too many questions, and looks at him like he's more than the weapon he's made himself into.

But the moment our hands touched, something ignited between us — and it didn't ask permission.

Now the Order is closing in, my pendant is burning with a power neither of us understands, and Kael has to choose: the control that's kept his family alive, or the one thing that might actually save them. Me.

The first flame is always the hardest to survive.