One by one, she is killing the men who sent her husband to the gallows. The last thing she needs is to be understood.

For two years Kira has erased herself: a different name in every town, a widow no innkeeper could describe, a list of seven names she has nearly finished working. Heartsbane in the wine, a clean exit before the body cools. Then a Crown investigator catches the pattern in her killings and starts north up the same frozen road, and he is everything she is. Patient. Precise. Impossible to lose. A man who reads a room the way she does, and who has already guessed what she is.

Catching her would be the easiest thing he has ever done. Letting her go would cost him everything he has built his life on. Across a winter of dying fires and snowbound inns, the distance between hunter and quarry keeps closing, two professionals each quietly handing the other the rope, and neither will name the thing that lives in the silence. He could end her with a single report. Instead he slides a warning under her bolted door.

A slow-burn revenge romance for listeners who like their lovers dangerous, their justice cold, and their endings hard-won.

• Enemies to lovers (hunter & quarry)
• Two morally grey equals
• Revenge romance
• Forced proximity
• Slow burn
• He tips his hand first
• Sensual / open-door — two on-page scenes, slow-burn payoff, literary rather than explicit.

Dark, atmospheric, character-driven.

Contains: poisoning and on-page killing, grief, wrongful execution and capital punishment, the death of a man who did not deserve it.