Riftborne

**By Bree Grenwich and Parker Lennox**

**Estimated Reading Time: 45 minutes**

**What This Story Explores:** The cost of surviving a colonized identity, the seduction of power when you have been powerless, and the dangerous line between becoming a weapon and becoming a person.

**Who This Book Is For:** Readers who want their fantasy romance to have teeth, who love morally complicated generals and heroines with destructive powers they cannot yet control, and anyone drawn to stories about found family, buried history, and the shadows that live inside us all.

The kingdom of Sídhe tells a story about itself. In that story, Sídhe is generous, civilized, and merciful. It crossed the sea to the eastern island of Riftdremar and offered progress. When radicalized leaders rebelled, Sídhe responded with sorrow and restraint. The children of that rebellion were not slaughtered. They were saved, branded with a mark of unity, and given new lives across the Isle. The official decree says so. The archives confirm it. The history is settled. Fia Riftborne knows better. She is one of those children, now twenty-three, living in the capital city of Luminaria with a gloved left hand that hides her brand. Her white hair and shadowed eyes mark her as other before she ever opens her mouth. She works in an apothecary under a woman she calls Ma, a healer who took her in when no one else would. She keeps her head down. She delivers tonics. She tries to be grateful enough to deserve the air she breathes. But the story Sídhe tells is a lie, and lies have a way of demanding payment. When Fia's rage finally detonates at an elite celebration in the Grove, she discovers that the curse whispered about her people is real. She carries a power that can steal voices, command minds, and shatter bodies. And someone has been watching her. General Laryk Ashford, the kingdom's most dangerous military commander, sees in Fia not a monster to be destroyed but a weapon to be forged. What follows is a story about control: who has it, who takes it, and what it costs to wield it. Fia will be pulled into Faction Venom, an elite unit training to fight shadow creatures called Wraiths that are seeping through a tear between worlds. She will forge bonds with fellow recruits, fracture her relationship with the woman who raised her, and fall into a consuming entanglement with a general who cannot read her mind and cannot stay away from her. She will discover that her power is stranger and more vast than she imagined, that she can walk through dreams and command the sleeping, and that the shadows she has feared her whole life…