The Shadow King's Forbidden Mate
A Court of Shadows, Blood Bargain RomantasyBy Lucienne Marr
Length7h 54m
About this audiobook
*Hold still. This will sting.*
Lenora Ashby has run the same injector into her brother's arm nine hundred times across three failed trials. Thomas is nineteen and looks fifteen. Fourteen months of nightshade and hellebore and sun-lily petals that cost more per ounce than her rent, and he still coughs blood into a handkerchief every morning.
Then the Queen summons her, and it turns out the Queen has been reading the private journal Lenora hid under a loose floorboard in Thomas's room.
The offer is laid out like a prescription. Marry Garrison Wick, the Night Court's spymaster, under the Rosethorn Pact, and serve as liaison between two fractured courts. In exchange, the Sun Court gets shadow-essence, the one substance that treats the wasting blight, and Lenora gets her licence back and a brother who stays in the infirmary rather than the charity ward.
The alternative is five years in the dungeons for sedition, and Thomas dying somewhere nobody treats him.
The wedding is in three days. The Pact binds them for a year, and whichever party breaks it without the other's consent dies for it.
His letter arrives sealed in black wax, stamped with a crescent moon.
*I have no more interest in you than you in me. Let's make this bearable.*
*We are both prisoners of our courts. Let us be civil prisoners.*
What Lenora does not know is that Garrison is not travelling to Aveline for a treaty. Rowan, his sister and his best agent, has been inside the Sun Court for months and is now sitting in a cell under an execution order, and his own king would rather let her die than put a concession in writing.
Garrison has sixteen days. He needs guard rotations, shift changes, cell locations. He needs the one person in Aveline with every reason to have written that down.
And her own household is watching. Marielle came in wearing mourning grey and checking ledgers, and the Queen has personally asked her to oversee the wedding arrangements.
A court romantasy told in first and third person, with an arranged marriage both parties treat as a contract, a spymaster who lies professionally, a blight with a deliberate origin, and a bargain that only holds as long as two people keep their halves of it. The romance is closed-door.
Audiobook details
GenreRomance, Fantasy
Length7 hrs 54 mins
Narrated byListen with 1,000+ voices
FormateBook with Audio
LanguageEnglish
Table of contents
1Chapter 1 - The Oath I Couldn’t Keep
2Chapter 2 - The Spy Who Knelt
3Chapter 3 - The Ceremony of Lies
4Chapter 4 - The Key in Her Pocket
5Chapter 5 - The Garden of Secrets
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6Chapter 6 - The Price of Essence
7Chapter 7 - The Taste of Shadow
8Chapter 8 - The Heist That Failed
9Chapter 9 - The Mirror’s Secret
10Chapter 10 - The Truth Between Us
11Chapter 11 - The Dowager’s Gambit
12Chapter 12 - The Library of Smoothed Pages
13Chapter 13 - The Favor She Owes
14Chapter 14 - The Cell of Echoes
15Chapter 15 - The Blame She Bears
16Chapter 16 - The Shadow He Keeps
17Chapter 17 - The Festival of Lanterns
18Chapter 18 - The Kiss That Wasn’t
19Chapter 19 - The Price of a Year
20Chapter 20 - The Queen’s Ultimatum
21Chapter 21 - The Choice That Breaks Her
22Chapter 22 - The Descent
23Chapter 23 - The Grand Gesture
24Chapter 24 - The Cure That Costs
25Chapter 25 - The Light We Choose
26Epilogue
27About the Author
28The End
29About the Author
30Also by Lucienne Marr
31Acknowledgements
32A Note from the Author
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