A Cloak of Salt and Feather

Some things aren't lost. They're waiting to be paid for. Ava Holt knows what she is now. She doesn't yet know what it will cost her - not really, not in the currency that matters. To understand the debt written into her blood, she follows it north, to the drowned islands her family fled three hundred years ago: Orkney, where the tide keeps ledgers older than any museum, and the valshamr - the falcon-feather cloak that binds her bloodline to Freyja - was torn to pieces and buried in salt and stone. >The order that hunted her in New York got here first, decades first, and they've been quietly excavating these islands for a very long time. Every piece of the cloak Ava recovers puts her one step ahead of them and one step closer to a truth she's not sure she wants. And there's a new cost now - one she can't blame on strangers or old orders. Loving Ronan Flett is starting to cost her, physically, measurably, in ways she can chart the way she'd chart a deterioration curve on an artifact she's watched too long in open air. He still checks every fact. He still refuses to look away. That's exactly the problem - the closer he gets, the more visible the toll becomes. >The sea gives things back. It never gives them back for free. For readers who love: forced proximity, a quest for a lost artifact, selkie-haunted islands, a love that costs something real, a morally gray enemy playing a long game, and stakes that keep climbing with nowhere left to hide. She came to Orkney to raise the cloak. She may lose more than she recovers.