In the gaslit heart of the Donaumark Empire, peace hangs by a single signature — and someone means to see it undone.
Ilka Farkas was born with a gift the empire fears more than it trusts her for: the ability to slip her mind into any beast within reach and see through eyes that were never meant to answer to her. Registered, watched, and never quite believed, she has spent eleven years serving the same Crown that once burned her village to the ground.
Now she's been sent to guard the one man trying to end a war before it starts — and what she finds inside his household is worse than politics. A conspiracy built on steel and old grudges. An assassin who kills without leaving a mark. A traitor standing close enough to touch. And a peace treaty that dies with the Archduke unless a woman the empire barely tolerates can stop it first.
She has a raven's eyes, a hound's nose, and eleven years of practice disappearing. It may not be enough.
They say in the hills of Vukovina that a warg who dies inside a borrowed skin never finds her way home. Ilka is about to find out how true that is.
