Four times a year, a man walks down into a hole in the ground and comes back up with less.Nobody in the Ceredwyn Court will speak to him. Not out of cruelty. Corridors simply empty when he passes, and forty people stand silent in a courtyard when he rides out, and a woman in the linen store leaves him wool socks on a mounting block and never once says a word. His family were struck from the household rolls a hundred and forty years ago and have appeared in no document since. He has never in his life been introduced to anybody.Isolde Ashryn came east to read an archive.She is the woman who found a hidden folio in her brother's castle and saved two lives with it, and she has spent six years believing that the thing which survives is the thing that is written down. Then she opens a household roll in a foreign country and finds a page younger than the binding that holds it, and understands that somebody has spent a lifetime making a record complete and wrong at the same time.The Warden is the only man alive who knows what is buried under the eastern range. He is also the only thing standing between two hundred thousand people and a winter that would end them.And every time Isolde touches him, the thing beneath the ground learns her a little better.SHADOWCLAIMED is a slow-burn enemies-to-lovers fantasy romance about buried records, inherited debts, and a man nobody has ever asked a single question. Open door romance. Full happily ever after.Book two of The Nightbound Pact. Begin with Shadowbound.Contains grief, memory loss, famine, historical violence, and the deaths of named characters.
