Feather and the Flame

Her mind was never the wound. Neither was his silence.

Linnet Hartley built a life around not feeling too much. Her gift, an unwilled empathy for every hurting creature that crosses her path, cost her mother everything, and Linnet has spent six careful years making sure it never costs her the same. When her aunt calls her home to a growing sanctuary for shifters and wildtouched souls the world has cast out, Linnet tells herself she's only staying for the season.

Then a half-feathered, terrified boy arrives at the gate, carrying more grief than any child should have to carry alone, and the man who saved him carries a grief of his own: eleven years spent atoning for an order he refused to follow, a debt he was never quick enough to fully repay. Silas Vane left his family's trade in disgrace. He did not expect to find, in a stranger's cottage garden, a woman patient enough to teach him that leaving was never the failure his brother made it out to be.

As Linnet finds she can no longer keep her walls up around a boy who trusts her completely, Silas's own brother is gathering the remnants of a shattered hunting lodge, determined to prove that everything the sanctuary stands for is exactly the danger he always claimed it was. Rescue, reckoning, and a found family fierce enough to fight for each other: Linnet and Silas will have to decide what they're willing to risk for a love neither of them expected to survive long enough to want.

A slow-burn, found-family romance about the courage it takes to stop hiding what makes you different, and the people worth letting see it.