The Unbound

The cage is empty. The door is open. And freedom, it turns out, is only where the real war begins.Saraya clawed her way out of the Order's cage and unwove the leash from her own root. She is free now - and finds that free is not the same as whole. The tether that once bound her to Kaelen Vaire by force is theirs by choice at last, but a chosen bond is not a painless one, and the war they thought they'd won has only changed its shape.Because the Order is broken, not beaten. The High Binder has learned that he no longer needs to chain Saraya and Kaelen to destroy them - he needs only to set the world on fire around them and let their own hearts do the rest. Every captive they free is a lever. Every person they love is a blade he can press to their throats from a hundred miles away.And far to the north, a grey wound the world has forgotten how to fear is beginning, very quietly, to wake.The second book of The Saga of The Gilded Cage takes a forced bond turned chosen and asks the harder question: what happens after the rescue - when the people you saved are afraid of you, when love is the weapon used against you, and when the only way to save the world might be the one thing neither of you can survive doing to the other.A dark epic romantasy of a forged bond, a morally grey hero, a slow burn, and a found family standing between a grieving world and the grey that would unmake it.For readers of Sarah J. Maas and Rebecca Yarros.