The Crimson Throne

The Crimson Hunt Trilogy, Book Three

By: Samantha Ashlit

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

She left without rage. She came back without certainty.

Four months after walking away from the Hunt Court — and from the man who abdicated his title without telling her — Maren Voss has built something that looks, from the outside, like a life. The snares are set. Her brother's wedding is planned. The unfinished letter sits in the bottom drawer of a desk with an uneven leg, and she is, most days, fine.

Then word reaches her that the court's foundational magic is failing faster than anyone projected. Lorn rides four hundred miles south to tell her the truth — not as a request, not as pressure, just as the facts she deserves to have. What she does with them is hers alone to decide.

She returns. Not to forgive easily, not to save a man who hasn't yet proved he's changed. She returns to understand, fully, what the compact has always required — and whether she is, finally, the person capable of giving it.

Vael has spent four months learning what he is without the authority he's spent two centuries hiding behind. He has burned three unsent letters. He has refused every shortcut the court's crisis might have justified. He has been, for the first time in three centuries, honest about the exact shape of his worst instinct — and he has protected her right to choose freely, even when the choosing might go against him.

When Caedric arrives in person to make his honest, charming, not-entirely-wrong argument about the cost of what she'd be becoming, Maren will have to decide not whether she loves this court and the man at its center, but whether the love she's built — freely, over a year of careful, deliberate work — is the kind that survives being chosen with her eyes fully open.

The compact has waited four hundred years.

She's finally ready to answer.

The Crimson Throne is the third and final book in the Crimson Hunt Trilogy — the HEA is guaranteed, and the slow burn is entirely earned.