A Bride for the Dragon Prince

Every ten years, the mortal kingdoms send a bride across the Jade Gate, and the dragon court of the Beiming Sea sends back its peace. Three hundred years of the bargain. Twenty-nine brides before her. Ji Zhi, twenty years old, a concubine-born incense artisan whose own father entered her name in the family genealogy for forty taels, is the thirtieth.

On her wedding night, she lifts her red veil and sees the famous dragon prince at the window, crushing a jade cup — not in anger, but because his hand will not obey him. Something inside the crown prince is fighting to get out, and the whole palace pretends not to hear it. So Ji Zhi does the one thing no bride has dared in three hundred years: she lights a thread of her own calming smoke for a prince of the deep.

His vertical pupils round into a man's eyes, and he gives her the first honest conversation of his life, and the first contract of her marriage: her smoke to steady the beast in his blood, his power to keep her safe in a court that eats brides. One year. No lies.

But no blend in the world can steady what it does not understand, and Ji Zhi is her father's daughter — an auditor born, with her mother's nose for poison. In the palace archives she finds the Bride Register: twenty-nine names, and every single bride died the same way, in her sleep, on the eve of the Heaven-Offering Rite. Her own name sits below them, the thirtieth line, waiting for its closing stamp. The Rite is thirty days away.

The courtship that follows is conducted in incense smoke and evidence. A prince who hoards working censers and calls her little smoke. A Gilded Prince whose gifts smell of candied poison and who smiles like a frozen sea. An ancient turtle-chancellor guarding three hundred years of stolen truth under his floor. A dispensary ledger with her death already reserved in it, dated ahead, initialed with a gilt wave. And a secret at the bottom of everything: no beast ever killed a bride. The real murderer has been using the dragon prince's own leash as the murder weapon, and the Rite itself is a stage built for his destruction.

To save him, Ji Zhi will brew the masterwork her mother left unfinished — nine rare things, nine days and nine nights — while the prince walks into his own chaining and kneels to the decree that names her the offering. And when the hidden cup breaks under the bride's own censer and the black dragon erupts through the pearl roof of the hall, the ancient law of the deep will do what it has always done to the uncontrolled: one hundred years in the Abyss.

The court says no smoke can burn in that dark. The court has never met an incense mistress in love.

A Bride for the Dragon Prince is a full-length fantasy romance of contract marriage catching fire: a soft-spoken woman with a spine of filed evidence, a prince at war with his own blood, wing-shelter and hoard-gifts and heat that stays just this side of the veil, and a courtship audited all the way to the bottom of the sea.