The Warlord's Unwanted Plus-One
By @john1208
On her deathbed, Neyla gripped her younger sister Qamara’s shirt and delivered one final, bizarre rule from her 'past life' memories: flee across the ocean and never, ever speak to Zehrav the Iron-Blooded, the warlord destined to slaughter them all. Deeply loyal and notoriously hot-tempered, Qamara immediately honors the dying wish. She steals the identity of a timid botanist named Farha, buys a one-way ticket through the Ley-Loom portals to a distant floating city, and breathes a sigh of relief. Then the portal collapses. To prevent its passengers from being lost in the void, the transit's emergency magic tightly tethers Qamara's soul to the only other person in the gate: Zehrav himself. Now physically stuck within a hundred paces of the brooding killer, Qamara must maintain her disguise as a weeping, fragile scholar while trying to ditch him in a chaotic jungle metropolis. Her hilarious, clumsy attempts to drive him away only convince him she needs his fierce protection. But the agonizing truth? Zehrav doesn't care about the botanist - he has always quietly, desperately loved Qamara's true self. What happens when she gets blackout drunk on fermented spark-fruit and furiously blabs the entire prophecy to the one man meant to kill her?
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