The court gave her sixteen sessions to prove she isn't dangerous. It sent her to the one man in Ostrave who already knows exactly what she's worth.

Zih Vakrenn has eight weeks to convince a soulwright she's an angry woman with a bad temper. The truth is worse: the thing that hollowed her mother when she was nine still lives in her hands, and the wrong finding on his form hands her to the Cloister, and no appeal has ever succeeded.

Doctor Elre Yesran is the finest tender on the terraces, warm, unhurried, the first person in twenty-seven years to measure her with the right instrument. He has also been harvesting souls for a hundred and forty years; he is rotting from the middle out, and she is the cure.

Every session costs her something. The gloves. The performances. The story she's told herself since she was nine. When she finally asks what he is, he doesn't lie, which turns out to be the cruelest thing he could have done.

This isn't a story about a woman's love redeeming a monster. It's about what she does with the whole truth once she has it, and what it costs to judge a man who was predator and physician in the same hour.

For readers who like their healers dangerous and their verdicts hard-won.

• Forced proximity by court order
• Forbidden: soulwright and patient
• Villain love interest ? he's not the hero
• Slow burn
• Soul magic where every touch is a transgression
• One explicit open-door scene