Warm to the Bone

She finished the clock perfectly - so the only thing left to do was break it again, on purpose, to keep him alive.Wren Ashby was supposed to leave Aldervane at dawn. Instead she sabotaged her own finished work - jammed the very mechanism she was hired to restore - to stall the curse that would have sealed Corvus in stone for a century, and then invented a contract to stay. The sealing isn't cancelled. It's delayed, and live, and waiting for any sunrise to finish what her repair began.So they go looking for a real way out. Night after night, deeper into the cathedral archives and the town's buried memory, the courtship that lived only in the dark becomes a true partnership - more intimate, more known, more impossible to give up. And for a while it looks like they've found the answer: the curse can be transferred to a willing replacement.Then the binding's terms come clear. The replacement has to be compatible. And the only person in Aldervane who fits every requirement is Wren.The thing that would free Corvus is the cage that would trap her - and he would rather do anything than let that happen.He'd rather be stone. So at dawn, the chamber doors bolt from the outside - Corvus inside, Wren locked out, and the hearing that could undo it a week away.