Blood and Bone

BLOOD AND BONE
Book Two of the Kope River Series

Akosua and Kwame chose each other in front of both houses. That was supposed to be the hard part.

The knot of cloth left at the grain cache proves what Akosua feared most: someone inside her own house orchestrated the terror that's been tearing both territories apart - and whoever it is knew her mother well enough to know exactly which wound would cut deepest. When the trail leads to Nana Adjeiwaa, the aunt who raised her, ran Kome's regency for nineteen years, and has never once given her reason to doubt her - Akosua has to decide how much truth she can survive, and how much her house is willing to bury to protect itself again.

What she finds isn't the enemy she expected. It's something worse: proof that the treaty, the losses, the entire shape of the war between Kome and Boateng may rest on a story her aunt built to survive her own worst night - not on anything either house actually knows to be true. And even as that truth breaks her family apart, someone else is still out there, patient, resourced, and very much still moving - using the chaos Akosua's own house created to strike harder than ever before.

Kwame stands beside her through all of it, at real cost to his own seat and his own house's patience, as the two of them stop investigating separately and start leading together - alpha to alpha, choosing each other on purpose this time, with nothing left to hide. But the deeper they dig, the further back the true threat's roots reach: past the current feud, past either house's founding, into something neither of them is prepared for.

A forced-bond romance turned marriage-in-motion political thriller - rooted in Akan tradition, leopard-shifter lore, and a mystery that refuses to stay buried. Book Two of the Kope River Series. Ends on a hook into Book Three.