Claimed by the Phoenix

A Steamy Fated Mates Monster Bride Romance

By: Tara Wilde

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

They chained me in a field of ash and called it mercy. I'm a charcoal burner. I know what fire leaves behind — and what it keeps.

Every longest night, the Tithe takes six girls, and the burned valley pays its bride to the ash. This year the lot fell on me: Sorcha Marsh, the collier's daughter, the woman who jokes at funerals because somebody has to keep the heat in.

They chained me to the iron post in three hundred acres of dead ground and sang their way home before the embers could watch them do it.

But what came up out of the ash wasn't the wildfire the village fears. He is Ignis, Lord of the Cinder Throne — a being of banked coals and bright seams, solemn as a forge and twice as patient, who has spent six hundred years tending the grief of a country that burned. And the flame-knot blazing in my palm says the oldest law in the fire just broke for the first time in six hundred years.

He banks a whole burning world to embers so I can cross it. He gives me flame-right: no fire of his will ever burn me. He learned my name from the smoke of every charcoal heap I ever tended — and he has been listening to my jokes for years.

But the Tithe was never what the elders claimed. The fire has been collecting, not consuming, and when the Hollow King's summons comes demanding I be delivered to the dark below the world, my phoenix will have to choose between the law that spared his country and the burner who relit his heart.

I've spent my whole life keeping other people's fires alive.

This one's mine.

Claimed by the Phoenix is a steamy fated-mates monster romance short read featuring a smoldering fire lord, a heroine who laughs at danger because it's rude not to, flame-right claiming against living coals, a mating bond that LOCKS in fire, and absolutely no fading to black. Standalone romance with an HEA-for-now and a series mystery burning toward its answer.