She was positioned, not deployed. And now she knows it. For three years, Seraphina Voss believed she was working against the empire's most dangerous faction. She filed precise reports, cultivated careful sources, and executed her mission with the pride of someone who took professional work seriously. She was wrong about all of it. Every report she sent advanced the conspiracy she thought she was fighting. Every skill she built was borrowed by the man who recruited her and used for purposes she was never meant to survive long enough to discover. Crown Prince Caelum has been assembling evidence against that same conspiracy for fourteen months. He knows who sent Seraphina. He knows what she was really for. He offers her the truth anyway — not as a gift, but as a negotiation. She has access and skills he cannot replicate. He has documentation that changes everything she thought she knew about the last three years of her life. The alliance they form is transactional, unwilling, and held together by mutual necessity and nothing else. That doesn't last. As the conspiracy tightens its timeline and the palace's walls close in, Seraphina's newly awakening ability begins to read things she cannot unsee — including the thread connecting her to a man she was never supposed to trust, running deeper than either of them is ready to name. The betrothal to another woman still stands. The evidence is still incomplete. The people who built the cage are still running. She's taking it apart anyway. A slow-burn spy romantasy of conspiracy, forbidden alliance, and the specific cost of trusting someone you weren't supposed to.Book 2 of The Hollow Crown Series — The Hollow Crown Book 1 available now.