Shadow Behind the Mask

The city calls her the Amicus, the arena’s shadow—an unwanted, dangerous survivor people pretend not to see.

Zanie prefers it that way. Keeping her head down, hiding her name, avoiding the one wrong encounter that might get her executed.

So far, it's kept her alive.

She owes that life to her benefactor—a gentle, incorruptible idealist who somehow manages to be both soft-spoken and impossible to bully. His charity work is infuriating the aristocrats who profit from suffering, and when the ruling regent fails to strangle those reforms with laws, he turns to quieter, nastier methods.

But Zanie won’t let him destroy the only person who ever showed her mercy.

To stop him, she has to sabotage him without revealing that she was once his property. Worse, she has to stay ahead of his son—an apprentice investigator whose sharp instincts and inconvenient kindness both cut far too close to the face she can’t let him see.

As danger tightens around her, Zanie finds herself caught between a ruthless noble who unknowingly holds the proof she needs… and a man she has no business talking to, let alone laughing with or falling for.

If she’s unmasked, she dies.

If she does nothing, the only good man she’s ever met loses everything.

And in a city where the law shelters monsters, the arena’s shadow may have to stop hiding—and start haunting.

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