Shadow War

On opposite sides of a brutal fifty-eight-day siege, General Kira Ashfeld and disgraced diplomat Brennan Hale are running out of time, soldiers, and reasons to keep pretending the war between their kingdoms is the only war they're fighting. When Brennan rides under a white flag carrying surrender terms, Kira shoves them back across the table - but the second document he places before her, the one with no seal and plain language and three months of damning evidence, is the one that changes everything. Two corrupt kings. One weapons manufacturer profiting from both sides. Eighteen thousand dead to clear an inventory backlog. The only way to end it is a coordinated betrayal that requires them to trust each other completely - and trust, between two people who loved each other before a border war made them enemies, has always been the most dangerous weapon in the room. Forced into close quarters, building a revolution in a war tent while armies wait outside, Kira and Brennan navigate the impossible geometry of a coup that must succeed simultaneously across two kingdoms, a timeline that keeps compressing, and five years of grief and want and careful distance that proximity is dismantling one weather notation at a time. The frost never reached the roots. It never stood a chance.