The Jealous Dark

Some debts can't be paid. They can only be carried.

Two weeks after the Chaos Arena, Alexis Rain is home - and everything that should have been resolved isn't. She survived the trial that was supposed to end the war. What she brought back is an open boon, undefined and irrefusable, owed to a force that predates the universe's rules. She hasn't told anyone. She should have.

The compound is bleeding. Someone inside their walls has been feeding intelligence to an enemy they haven't fully identified - not an outside threat, but a person who shares their briefings, their air, their trust. Until Alexis has a name, everyone is suspect. Including the people she would die for.

And then there's Kieran. The former enemy who isn't an enemy anymore, standing in her compound asking for a chance to be something else. His convictions were manufactured. His anger cultivated. His entire sense of self engineered by a force more ancient than the Olympians. None of that makes him easy to trust in a house that might already have one traitor in it.

What Alexis is learning to see - in the specific, reluctant way of someone who has stopped dismissing things she doesn't understand - is that nothing has been coincidence. The artifact thefts. The Arena. The war that seemed to end and didn't. One campaign. Three thousand years in the making. Driven by the oldest jealousy there is.

The Jealous Dark concludes The New Scions trilogy. A story about carrying primordial power in human hands, the loyalty that survives betrayal, and an enemy whose reason is as old as darkness itself.

Everyone has a reason. Even the ones that predate reason.