K.S. VALENTINA
BRIGHTWATER
It’s here. The light finally has hands.
For five books, Feu has been the amber flicker at the tree line. The thing you are never supposed to follow. He spent seven months leading danger away from Della before she knew enough to thank him for it.
Now the fourth room opens. Not like Leste’s — water has rules, the channel has weight. Feu is light, wanting shape, and the covenant has never been generous with wanting. It starts as a flicker at dusk. It does not stay a flicker. Brightwater is the book where the light learns to stay — and Della has to decide what it costs to keep him.
Della paid fifteen years of her life to save the man in the channel. She would do it again. The problem is what the trade gave back — a tremor, gray at her temples, a house watching from the kitchen window, and a will-o’-wisp on the bench beside her, turning more real than the light has any right to be.
Some lights lure you into the dark.
And some lights have been keeping the dark from finding you.
A note from the property
I have been writing toward Brightwater since the porch first appeared on the page in Boundwater and the fourth room refused to open. The household has been ready for it for one hundred and seventy-eight Mays. Feu has been ready for it for longer. Della is the one who wasn’t.
This is the book where the cost of the holding becomes a number she can read. Where the four stop being four monsters at the fence and start being a household at the table, with a fifth plate set down and a man at the porch railing waiting to be chosen in the summer light.
Thank you for being at the table for it. Every preorder, every page read, every note you sent me about the light at the tree line — I felt all of it.
And now the next book — the last book — is finished enough to give you a date.
The last morning is coming
Something new is stirring in the marsh
A book I’m pressing into your hands
If you came to my work for the academy, the monsters, and the why-choose of it all — I have a friend whose book belongs on your shelf next to mine. Sable Wynn just opened the gates on Irongate Academy: a reverse-harem shifter academy where the lessons bite back and nobody graduates as who they enrolled. It’s mean in all the right places, and the heroine is the most dangerous thing in the room before the shifters are. I read these too. This one I wanted you to have.