by
Hannah Whitten
From the instant New York Times bestselling author of For the Wolf comes a brand-new adventure filled with dark secrets, twisted magic, glittering palaces, and forbidden romance.
When Lore was thirteen, she escaped a cult in the catacombs beneath the city of Dellaire. And in the ten years since, she’s lived by one rule: Don’t let them find you. Easier said than done, when her death magic ties her to the city.
Mortem, the magic born from death, is a high-priced and illicit commodity in Dellaire, and Lore’s job running poisons keeps her in food, shelter, and relative security. But when a run goes wrong and Lore’s power is revealed, Lore fully expects a pyre, but King August has a different plan. Entire villages on the outskirts of the country have been dying overnight, seemingly at random. Lore can either use her magic to find out what’s happening and who in the King’s court is responsible, or die.
Lore is thrust into the Sainted King’s glittering court, where no one can be believed and even fewer can be trusted.
It’d been three years since any of them had paid rent, but Nicolas still thought to send his most unfortunate son to ask at the end of every month. Lore assumed they drew straws, and assumed that someone cheated, because it was always the youngest and spottiest of the bunch. Pierre, his name was, and he carried it nearly as poorly as he carried his father’s already overfull purse.
A dressing gown that had seen better days dripped off one shoulder as Lore leaned against the doorframe at an angle carefully calculated to appear nonchalant. Pierre’s eyes kept drifting there, and she kept having to press her lips together not to laugh. Apparently, a crosshatch of silvery scars from back-alley knife fights didn’t deter the man when presented with bare skin.
She had other, more interesting scars. But she kept her palm closed tight.
A cool breeze blew off the harbor, and Lore suppressed a shiver. Pierre didn’t seem to spare any thought for wondering why she’d exited the house barely dressed, right at the edge of autumn. An easy mark in more ways than one.
“Pierre!” Lore shot him a dazzling grin, the same one that made Michal’s eyes go heated and then narrow before asking what she wanted. Another twist against the doorframe, another seemingly casual pose, another bite of wind that made a curse bubble behind her teeth. “It’s the end of the month already?”
“I—um—yes.” Pierre managed to fix his eyes to her face, through obviously conscious effort. “My father… um, he said this time he means it, and…”
Lore let her face fall by careful degrees, first into confusion, then shock, then sorrow. “Oh,” she murmured, wrapping her arms around herself and turning her face away to show a length of pale white neck. “This month, of all months.”
She didn’t elaborate. She didn’t need to. If there was anything Lore had learned in twenty-three years alive, ten spent on the streets of Dellaire, it was that men generally preferred you to be a set piece in the story they made up, rather than trying to tell it yourself.
In that regard, Pierre didn’t disappoint. From the corner of her eye, she saw his pale brows draw together, a deepening blush lighting the skin beneath his freckles. They were all moon-pale, Nicolas’s boys. It made their blushes look like something viral.
His eyes went past her, to the depths of the dilapidated row house beyond. It was morning, though only just, and the shadows hid everything but the dust motes twisting in sun shards. Not that there was much to see back there, anyway. Michal was still asleep upstairs, and Elle was sprawled on the couch, a wine bottle in her hand and a slightly musical snore on her lips.
“Is there an illness?” Pierre kept his voice hushed, low. His face tried for sympathetic, but it looked more like he’d put bad milk in his coffee. “A child?”
Lore’s brows shot up. In all the stories she’d let men spin about her, that was a first. But beggars couldn’t be choosers. She gently laid a hand on her abdomen and let that be answer enough. It wasn’t technically a lie if she let him draw his own conclusions.
She was past caring about lying, anyway. In the eyes of the Bleeding God, Lore was damned whether or not she kept her spiritual record spotless. Might as well lean into it.
“Oh, you poor girl.” Pierre was probably younger than she was, and here he went clucking like a mother hen. Lore managed to keep her eyes from rolling, but only just. “Do you know who the father is?” He raised his hand, settled it on her bare shoulder.
And every nerve in Lore’s body seized.
It was abrupt and unexpected enough for her to shudder, to shake off his hand in a motion that didn’t fit the soft, vulnerable narrative she’d been building ever since she opened this damn door. She’d grown used to feeling this reaction to dead things—stone, metal, cloth. Corpses, when she couldn’t avoid them. It was natural to sense Mortem in something dead, no matter how unpleasant, and at this point, she could hide her reaction, keep it contained.
She shouldn’t feel Mortem in a living man, not one who wasn’t at death’s door. Her shock was quick and sharp, and chased with something else—the scent of foxglove.
Her fingers closed around his wrist, twisted, forced him to his knees at the edge of the doorframe. It happened quick, quick enough for him to slip on a stray pebble and send one leg out at an awkward angle, for a strangled “Shit!” to echo through the silent morning streets of Dellaire’s Harbor District.
Lore crouched so they were level. Now that she knew what to look for, it was clear in his eyes. All poisons worked differently, and foxglove was one of the riskier ones. Pierre’s gaze was bloodshot and glassy; his heartbeat under her hand, slow and irregular. He’d gone to one of the cheap deathdealers, then. One who didn’t know how to properly dose their patrons, one who only gave them enough to make them sick, not bring them to death’s threshold. Stupid.
The Mortem under Pierre’s skin throbbed against her grip, thumping and meaty, a second, diseased pulse. Mortem was in everyone—the essence of death, the darkness born of entropy—but the only way to use it, to bend it to your will, was to nearly die. To touch oblivion, and for oblivion to touch you back, then let you go.
Most died before they got there. More never got close enough, earning only a sour stomach or blindness or a scattered mind for their efforts. And some didn’t actually want the power at all, just the euphoria, a poison high that skated you near death, but not near enough to wield it. It took a closer brush with eternity to use Mortem than most were willing to try.
The Bleeding God and Buried Goddess knew Lore wouldn’t have, if she’d had the choice.