Shadow Assassin

The deadliest operative in the realm drops from a ceiling expecting a sleeping target and finds a lord who has been waiting for her - because he hired his own assassin, not to die, but to live. Lord Castien Ashmore, arms dealer and alleged traitor, has spent three years alone building an ironclad case against a slave ring that reaches all the way to a royal seal, and the only person ruthless enough, skilled enough, and clean enough to help him finish it is the woman currently holding a blade to his throat. Maren Cole has never failed a contract, never broken a Guild directive, never let anything through the walls she built at fifteen years old and has been reinforcing ever since - until a velvet chair, a candlelit study, and a man whose pulse didn't rush under her knife begin dismantling everything she thought she knew about herself. What follows is a fortress infiltrated twice, a prince exposed, a kingdom set on fire, and two people who were each other's most dangerous variable long before they admitted it. Blade-sharp tension, slow-burn heat that ignites under pressure, and a love story forged in cold water and dark corridors between two people who chose each other before they had the language for it.