The Hearth Contract
READING AGE 16+
Cinder is a fire spirit who has lost everything: his rank, his reach, the valley he used to cover. Now he's a thumbnail of flame inside a boy named Owen Penn, working at Tanner's shop and pretending he isn't starving.
Rennie is the girl who feeds him. She doesn't ask for much—just a contract, just a promise, just a place at her family's table. But Cinder has already learned what happens when he takes more than he's given. The last time, the strike burned him down to almost nothing.
What grows between them isn't simple. It's warmth, and debt, and a lie Rennie's family keeps telling to protect her. Cinder wants to go home. Rennie wants him to stay. Neither of them knows how to want something without someone else paying for it.
The Hearth Contract is a slow-burn fantasy about a fire that has to learn how to be fed, and a girl who has to decide what she's willing to bind herself to. Intimate, food-heavy, and full of quiet choices that cost more than they look.
Unfold
You Little Terror
Wren had told two people that Rennie was in the bathroom. One of them had been a teacher. The teacher had stood looking at the bathroom door for a while, and then gone off down the hall. Wren stayed where she was with her heart going, and knew she wasn't going to get away with it twice.
Afte……
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