The Ash Court Contract Bride

The execution fire is already licking at her feet when Gu Wantang wakes in the body of a condemned noble bride. Before she can prove she never ordered poison, a black-armored frontier heir steps into the flames and offers her one way out: marry him for thirty days. Rowan Vale is the crown’s feared political outcast—and the only man powerful enough to delay her sentence. Their sham marriage buys her time to expose the swapped medicine bottle, but every witness must face flames that punish what they believe, not what is true. As Wantang dismantles testimony with the instincts of a crisis negotiator, she discovers the murder is only the first move in a royal purge targeting Rowan’s bloodline—and the colder he acts, the harder it becomes to ignore the way he protects her. When their contract expires, Rowan must choose between saving his frontier and stepping into the soul-burning fire to claim her crime as his own—will he let her burn, or die in her place?