A Vow of Fire and Blood

Three hundred years of running ends at the water her family fled across. Ava Holt has traced her bloodline home - to a black fjord in Norway, to the longest night of the year, to the place where a foremother once broke a vow to a goddess and paid for it with three centuries of silence. The debt didn't disappear when she ran. It waited. It compounded. And now the one whose name is on the account is close enough to answer for it in person. Freyja is no longer a story Ava studies in glass cases. She is near, and she is owed, and the ledger she's holding was forged - deliberately, expertly, by the very order that has been one step ahead of Ava since the moment a bone clasp went missing in a Hudson Valley museum. At the head of that order stands the woman who wrote the lie in the first place: Gunnhild, three hundred years patient, and utterly certain that a forged truth published early enough simply becomes the truth. Ava has one chance to refuse a debt that was never rightfully hers - not by running, not by dying young the way every daughter before her did, but by doing what no woman of her line has ever dared: standing at the door herself, and writing the terms in her own hand. The price of that will be real. It will be permanent. And it will fall hardest on the one person she was never willing to let it touch - Ronan, a mortal man who followed the evidence all the way to a goddess's threshold, for a woman who is becoming something he can never quite be again. What Ava chooses on the longest night will decide what her bloodline means for every daughter who comes after her - and what love is worth when the bill finally, truly, comes due. For readers who love: a reckoning at the source, a goddess made flesh on the page, an old vow rewritten on new terms, mortal-loves-immortal stakes, a hard-won happily-ever-after with a permanent price, and a finale built to devastate. The debt is ancient. The choice is hers. The cost is the one thing she can't get back.