Ark of Glass

The truth didn't end the war. It just changed who's fighting it.

Six months after a buried signal exposed the frontier's most convenient lie, the diplomatic ark Casivane carries the last fragile peace between four factions who no longer trust each other - or the institutions that lied to them.

Talia Soren knows exactly how that lie was built. She was part of the machinery that buried it: senior enough to know something was wrong, professional enough not to ask. Now retired, she's been brought aboard the Casivane as crisis advisor - a title precise enough to be useful and deniable enough to be discarded. She didn't expect to care this much about getting it right.

Dr. Imani Phale doesn't need Talia's record to understand her. As the ark's shipboard psychologist, Imani has spent years treating the quiet damage institutional suppression leaves behind - officers who knew and said nothing, careers ended without explanation. She recognises Talia immediately. What she doesn't expect is to want to know her.

When a sabotage campaign starts dismantling the Casivane from the inside, Talia and Imani are the only two people positioned to stop it - Talia reading the ship's structural fault lines, Imani reading the fractures in the people aboard. But what each of them knows is exactly what their professions forbid them from sharing: classified intelligence on one side, privileged confidence on the other. Every step closer to solving the sabotage is a step deeper into trusting someone they were trained never to trust completely.

As the conspiracy closes in and the factions edge toward open conflict, Talia and Imani have to choose - between the safety of staying contained and the risk of being fully known, between institutional silence and the harder, costlier truth of what they actually owe each other.

Ark of Glass is Book 2 in the Frontier of Ash and Light series - a mature, slow-burn F/F space-opera romance of political intrigue, institutional reckoning, and two women who finally stop managing each other and start choosing each other. Standalone HEA; series threads continue.

Perfect for readers who love: competent adult protagonists, dual POV slow burn, found-family crews under political pressure, and romances where trust is the highest-stakes negotiation in the room.