The Sundered (en Inglés) - Alexis Garcia

He is across the room, sitting up against the wall by the cold hearth where he has clearly been for some while, Vael laid across his knees and his banked-gold eyes already open and on me, and the hot line of the bond between us is awake in a way it was not yesterday - taut, aware, alert to me, drawn tight as a bowstring across the small room. There is something far more complicated than anger - something taut and wanting and held very carefully, terribly still.

...

"And I want you. I have wanted you since a bend in a road in the Wilds, and it has been a fire in me I have not once been able to put out, and last night I lay awake in the dark of that back room and felt the first bond close between you and him and I wanted, Forge take me, to come through the wall." His golden eyes come round to me then. "But I do not know how to ask for a thing I want. I have never once in my life asked for a thing I wanted; I take what a war hands me, and I hold what I am able to hold, and I want nothing out loud, ever - because wanting a thing out loud is exactly how they learn the place to cut you." His voice drops lower still, rougher. "So if this is to happen between us, you are going to have to be the one to ask. I cannot do it. I do not have the language. A hundred years and I never learned it. You will have to speak it. For the both of us."

...

"Look at me," I say - and his eyes come to me, and hold. "I want you, Rian. I'm asking you, out loud, so there's no mistaking it. I want you to put the sword down. I want you to put the line down. I want you to set the whole hundred years down on the floor of this room, just here, just with me, just for this. I want you to stop holding back from me. I am asking you for it, in words, so you don't have to find them. Yes?"

Something breaks across his hard face... he reaches down and sets Vael aside on the floorboards with slow, deliberate care, and says, rough, and wrecked, and certain: "Yes."

Wren Halloway has spent her life seeing things no one else could - and being told not to trust her own eyes.

Then the protections hidden throughout her grandmother's cottage begin to fail. A secret letter reveals another world beside her own, and Wren is driven across the veil into Aevenmoor: a realm of rival courts, dying magic, and Hollows that erase everything they touch.

There, she is named the Sundered - a woman carrying a shattered soul, a power every court wants to control, and bonds leading to four fated mates.

The first two men to find her are dangerous in entirely different ways. Kit is a seductive shadow-walker whose easy smile conceals a lifetime of deception. Rian is a battle-scarred Ember general made of fire, discipline, and barely restrained desire. Both would kill to protect her. Neither gets to decide what the bonds mean for her.

As Aevenmoor unravels, Wren must uncover what her grandmother hid, survive the forces hunting her, and decide whether she can trust the men fate placed in her path without surrendering the choice that makes her who she is.

Fate may have bound them. Wren will decide what happens next.

The Sundered is Book One of the Aevenmoor Trilogy, an adult why-choose fantasy romance featuring fated mates, magical bonds, open-door spice, morally gray protective heroes, court intrigue, found family, and a heroine who refuses to be claimed.