Warbound

Maren Holt is a healer’s daughter and a treaty-scribe, the most expendable soul in the whole Aldermere delegation, which is exactly why the crown hands her over to the orcs as a hostage of good faith. One winter in the war-camp of the chief who fought her kingdom to a standstill, and if she lives to the spring thaw, the war ends.

Draghan, war-chief of the Ironwold clans, has every reason to hate her. But Maren is the only human who ever bothered to learn his people’s law, and when a wound-fever no orc healer can break is killing one of his young warriors, she is the one who cuts it out. So the war-chief raised to loathe her kind does the last thing she expects. He offers her a warbond, an oath that makes her kin under his law and puts her under a protection so absolute that to touch her is to war with his whole people. It is supposed to be politics. Except an Ironwold warbond is void unless both of them mean it, and the longer she stands at his side the more she is afraid that she does.

Then the raids begin. Human villages burned in the night, the survivors swearing it was orcs, the fragile peace shattering, and every eye in two kingdoms turning to Draghan. But Maren has set enough broken bones and read enough steel to know a frame when she sees one, and the hand behind it belongs to a man who has grown rich on this war and does not mean to let it end. They think she is only a scribe. They have no idea that the warbond gave her a voice in the moot, and that she has gathered every scrap of proof she needs to use it.

Warbound is a standalone orc warlord romance with a guaranteed happily-ever-after. For adult readers.