The Shadow King's Forbidden Mate : A Court of Shadows, Blood Bargain Romantasy, livre ebook

*Hold still. This will sting.*
Lenora Ashby has run the same injector into her brother's arm nine hundred times across three failed trials. Thomas is nineteen and looks fifteen. Fourteen months of nightshade and hellebore and sun-lily petals that cost more per ounce than her rent, and he still coughs blood into a handkerchief every morning.
Then the Queen summons her, and it turns out the Queen has been reading the private journal Lenora hid under a loose floorboard in Thomas's room.
The offer is laid out like a prescription. Marry Garrison Wick, the Night Court's spymaster, under the Rosethorn Pact, and serve as liaison between two fractured courts. In exchange, the Sun Court gets shadow-essence, the one substance that treats the wasting blight, and Lenora gets her licence back and a brother who stays in the infirmary rather than the charity ward.
The alternative is five years in the dungeons for sedition, and Thomas dying somewhere nobody treats him.
The wedding is in three days. The Pact binds them for a year, and whichever party breaks it without the other's consent dies for it.
His letter arrives sealed in black wax, stamped with a crescent moon.
*I have no more interest in you than you in me. Let's make this bearable.*
*We are both prisoners of our courts. Let us be civil prisoners.*
What Lenora does not know is that Garrison is not travelling to Aveline for a treaty. Rowan, his sister and his best agent, has been inside the Sun Court for months and is now sitting in a cell under an execution order, and his own king would rather let her die than put a concession in writing.
Garrison has sixteen days. He needs guard rotations, shift changes, cell locations. He needs the one person in Aveline with every reason to have written that down.
And her own household is watching. Marielle came in wearing mourning grey and checking ledgers, and the Queen has personally asked her to oversee the wedding arrangements.
A court romantasy told in first and third person, with an arranged marriage both parties treat as a contract, a spymaster who lies professionally, a blight with a deliberate origin, and a bargain that only holds as long as two people keep their halves of it. The romance is closed-door.