Katrin F. Challoner

When a marriage is brokered to pause a blood-feud between two warring factions, neither side puts down their blades. For the bride, a scavenger who can feel the history of broken things simply by touching them, the arrangement is a cage. For the groom, it is a calculation. Thrust into a household where every meal might be poisoned and every smile hides a dagger, she discovers a terrifying truth hidden in the estate’s rusted relics: a wrongful execution that secured the current balance of power. With only her strange intuition and her hard-won survival instincts, she must untangle a conspiracy that implicates both their families before the truce shatters. But the most dangerous thing in this marriage might just be the growing, undeniable gravity between a captor playing by rules she doesn’t understand, and a bride who refuses to be collateral.

The barge Kerevet carries a god in chains and a woman who keeps it breathing. Kaya-bek has hidden what she is for three years — until Temurbek, the captain sworn to drown both idol and anchor before the solstice falls, looks at her and sees not a weapon but a woman he cannot bring himself to kill. As a rebel priestess plots to free the god and a mercenary schemes to steal it whole, the barge becomes a closed battlefield where every faction wants Kaya dead, freed, or owned. Temurbek has three days to choose between his oath and his obsession — and the river does not forgive hesitation.