The Unfinished Souls

Marriage was supposed to be the hard part. Isriel and Kael survived that—survived a curse, a splinter, a wedding neither of them chose. What they didn't expect was a kingdom that keeps needing them to survive it all over again. When a widow's letter leads them to a debt older than her family's memory, Isriel and Kael find themselves chasing a pattern of vanishings that all point to the same terrifying possibility: Mother Vahl, exiled and presumed harmless, never stopped listening for the moment someone would finally ask her the right question.

Isriel and Kael thought the reckoning was over. Mother Vahl is in chains. The children are home. For the first time since their wedding day, the cold has stopped following them into every room. Then a letter arrives — carried by a trembling hand, addressed to the Princess who speaks to old things — and it asks the one question they can never refuse: what happens to the souls no one ever finished asking about?