Aswen has spent years using her gift to smuggle the powerless to safety, one terrified family at a time, and trying to forget the two boys she once loved, who chose the other side.

One rises through the regime's ranks, brutal and untouchable, until the night he saves her life and asks for nothing in return but a chance to tell her the truth: that some part of him never stopped being hers.

The other defects, trading everything he knows for a redemption he isn't sure he deserves.

As the resistance closes in on the tyrant who taught them both that power excuses everything, Aswen has to decide what she owes the men who chose violence, and then chose her, and what it costs to fight beside people you can't forgive.

Because winning the war was never going to be the hard part. Living with what it took to win it, that's the reckoning no one prepared her for.

A story about complicity, conviction, and the impossible calculation of loving someone who chose wrong.