The Bond Mentor's Last Contract

About this book

Beneath a dead volcano, the undercity of Cinderfall runs on human feeling. The Directorate meters heat the way older empires metered bread, and its harvesters draw current from the passion of arranged couples bonded under surveillance. Somebody has to teach those couples how to look convincing. For twenty-four years that somebody has been Liora Veyne, fifty-seven, tall and gaunt, a burn scar pulling at her left cheek and her iron-gray braids coiled tight as forge wire. She scripts the vows. She counts the beats before the kiss. She was once a heat rioter whose choices emptied a gallery of neighbors, and she has since made a profession of teaching people to perform what she no longer permits herself to feel. Then a contract lands on her bench with her estranged daughter's name on it, and beside it the name of the Directorate engineer Sera has been paired with: a lame, burn-handed cartographer who still carries an unregistered spark-stone Liora gave him a lifetime ago. To keep her daughter alive, Liora must rehearse the woman she abandoned everything for into another woman's marriage — and the meters in the Bond Halls do not care what the script says. They only measure what is true. Told in third-person omniscient across braided timelines — present-day sessions in the steaming Bond Halls, the buried hours of the Night of Black Vents, and a cold gallery somewhere ahead where all of it settles into ice — this is an adult romance of scorched intimacy, family debt, and the difference between devotion and obedience. There are no chosen ones in Cinderfall, and nothing here is saved cheaply.

Book details

Genres:

Classic Romance, Dystopian Science Fiction, Literary Fiction, Political Thriller

Language:

en

Published:

2026-07-30

Content rating:

R