Beyond Power

The Moon-Crest Promise She wears her guilt in indigo. He wears his in scars. Shuo was born to heal. Now her hands, stained permanently blue from the dye vats where she hides, are forbidden to touch a wound. Her family’s gift died with her sister — cut down by the same clan that now hunts anyone who might hold the cure they want for themselves. Jun was born to kill. Now his hands, calloused from carving wooden birds instead of gripping a blade, ache to protect the one person who makes him want to stay small, stay silent, stay hidden. But the wolf his father raised is never far beneath the surface — and some nights, it wakes. They are Li and Meng. Healer and hunter. Two names that should never share a room, let alone a secret room above a spice shop, where cinnamon covers the smell of fear and a single carved cedar pin is the only proof that love found them anyway. But Agent Long has come to the river district. He isn’t looking for runaways. He’s looking for the Moon-Crest — a root that can call the dying back from the threshold, and a root that Shuo’s own father once searched twenty years for and never found. The mountain doesn’t sell what it holds. It trades. And as the wolves close in on the only sanctuary they’ve ever known, Shuo and Jun must decide what they’re willing to pay — in gold, in years, or in the truth of who they really are — to buy a future neither of their families would ever allow.