The Unbelieved

She has never once been believed. He has never once been lied to.

For five years the oracle Cassandra has been kept soft and silent behind the gilded lattice of the House of Quiet, where Troy stores the god-touched women it would rather not hear. Apollo gave her a gift and then a curse: she speaks nothing but truth, and not one living soul can believe a word of it. She has learned to ration her voice, to keep the deaths she sees behind her teeth, to let the god's beautiful city call her mad. Then a merchant she warned dies exactly as she foretold - and something that does not breathe comes to collect him.

Thanatos is not a god. He is the cold at the end of every life, the Quiet God whom Troy will not name, and he has come because a mortal woman described a death before he knew its shape himself. He cannot lie. No door or ward can bar him. And when he closes his hand around her bare one and the killing chill of her gift never comes - when he, alone in all creation, believes her - Cassandra understands she has found the one being the curse cannot touch. But she still wears another god's brand on her wrist. Under Olympian law she is Apollo's property, and Death's hands on what the sun has claimed is theft, tried before the council and paid for in lives, or in the office that keeps the dead from staying among the living.

Cassandra has already seen how Troy ends: the sea standing up like a wall, a hundred years of the dead crossing in a single night, the boatman weeping. She has seen it, and been laughed at. Now, with a Death who takes her at her word and a festival counting down to the drowning, the woman who taught herself silence must learn to make gods listen - before Apollo's wounded pride turns his face from the water and hands her vision its terrible hour. To save her city, she may have to become something the curse was never written to hold.

The Unbelieved is a standalone adult fantasy romance - a dark, slow-burning reimagining of Cassandra of Troy and Death himself. Forbidden love, a forced partnership of two halves of one truth, touch-her-and-die devotion, a gilded cage, and a morally grey god of death who proves gentler than the god of light. Explicit open-door content and a hard-won happily-ever-after. For readers 18+.