The Salt Vow

About this book

In a sinking city of a hundred islands, Liora Vasca, who reads salt, is bound by an ancient law to marry Aurel Corvane, the Warden of the Seawall whose testimony sent her father to his death. She marries him to save her dying brother. A slow-burn enemies-to-lovers romantasy.

In a sinking city of a hundred islands, the woman who reads salt is forced to marry the man whose lie killed her father.

Liora Vasca has spent three years carrying her family’s ruin alone. Her father was condemned a traitor and drowned in the salt-cells; her brother is dying of the brackish water; and the tide-wards that hold the sea off Solmarre are failing faster every season. When the Doge invokes an ancient law to bind House Vasca to House Corvane, Liora is wed against her will to Aurel Corvane, the cold, exacting Warden of the Seawall — the boy whose testimony sent her father to his death.

She marries him to save her brother. She stays to read the truth out of the Corvane salt. What she finds is worse than she feared: her father was innocent, framed by the very Regent who raised Aurel, a velvet-voiced man quietly engineering the drowning of the poor for the profit of the dry land they’ll be forced to buy. And the more truth Liora and Aurel uncover together, the clearer it becomes that the proof which clears her father will destroy her husband — and that the man she has started, impossibly, to love may be the one thing she cannot afford to want.

As the worst tide in ninety years bears down on Solmarre, Liora must decide whether to do the only thing she has ever known how to do — carry it all alone, behind a wall she built to survive — or learn, at last, that some lines can only be held by two hands.

A slow-burn enemies-to-lovers romantasy of buried truth, drowning cities, and the terrible courage of letting yourself be caught. Warm heat, a marriage of convenience that becomes a choice, and a Happy For Now that is chosen with eyes open.