Echoes in a Metal Forest

Every hundred years, the Iron Forest claims its due.Wren Calder never expected to outlive her father's forge — let alone her own tribute day. When the village lottery chooses her name, she walks into the cursed woods expecting a quick death. What she finds instead is a manor grown from iron and root, a fae lord with antlers like broken branches, and a task two centuries of tributes have died trying to complete: forge a blade that can shatter his curse.Aeric Vael has hollowed out every soul sent to him — not by choice, but by a curse that turns his own hunger for company into slow theft. He's stopped hoping for a tribute who might survive him. He's certainly stopped hoping for one who'd call his life's work bad management on her first day in his hall.But Wren doesn't scare easily, and she doesn't walk away from broken things. As she and Aeric work the forge together — starlight ore, a shard of his own glass heart, and the one ingredient no tribute has ever managed to give — she starts to wonder if the real curse was never punishment at all. It was a dare. A chance for a man who took away someone's choice to finally learn what it costs to be loved on someone else's terms.The blade can only be finished by someone who stays. Someone who chooses him, freely, with eyes wide open to everything it might cost her.Wren intends to finish the job.A slow-burn, forced-proximity fantasy romance with fae lore, a beastly hero worth the wait, and a heroine who fixes what everyone else assumed was unfixable.