Cinderbride

They call it the highest honor a family can win. No one tells the bride what it actually costs her.

Linnet Vance rakes hearths before dawn and carries her stepsisters' trains after dark. Nine years in her stepmother's house have made her very good at being unseen. She isn't even registered for tonight's Selection - she's staff, sent to stand in the receiving line and disappear.

Then the Ember Slipper, the relic said to choose the fae lord's one true bride, streams straight past every highborn candidate in the hall and clasps around her ankle instead.

Lord Rhen Corvane has refused the Slipper's choice seven times in nine years, breaking the bond with his own hands rather than let another girl pay the price his own mother paid. He doesn't know exactly what that price is. He only knows he watched it kill her slowly, and no one has ever told him it could be different.

Linnet is the one person in Hearthhold who can hear the truth no one else can: the dragon chained beneath the court, dying in silence, and the difference between a vow freely given and one nobody bothered to explain. The coldest lord in the realm has to decide whether to keep protecting her the only way he knows how - by refusing her - or finally tell her everything, and trust a servant girl nobody chose to choose for herself.

Cinderbride is a standalone fae-and-dragon romantasy for readers who love a rags-to-riches retelling with teeth, a hidden-power heroine who was never on anyone's guest list, a morally grey fae lord who protects by refusing, a dragon who is a person and not a mount, and a slow burn that pays off open-door. Standalone. HEA guaranteed. Come for the girl nobody registered. Stay for the choice nobody let her make until now.

A wicked stepmother. A magic slipper that isn't a shoe. A vow that was always meant to be freely chosen - the fairy tale finally told the way it should have been.