Cost of Reverie
A boy. A vow. A price no one warned him about.
In the divided city of Valmont, the High Row feasts while the Hollows starve beneath debts the Council designed to be unpayable. When that Council hangs his older brother, seventeen-year-old Apollo Makayabo buries him and makes a single vow: he will protect what remains of his family. Whatever it takes. No matter the cost.
Apollo is a strategist, not a soldier, and he has found the one flaw in a system built to last forever. He does not need to burn it down. He needs to get inside it, into the room where a handful of people decide who eats, who starves, and who hangs.
But every step upward asks for something in return. A stranger he could have saved. A friend he cannot. A quiet-eyed woman who sees the person beneath the strategy, and who may be the last one who can still reach him. Apollo tells himself it is all for Reverie: the life he promised his family, a place where they are safe and whole and free.
He may yet reach it. The question that shadows every step is whether or not the boy who made the vow will still be there to feel it.
Debut novel · A standalone emotional arc · First of a planned trilogy
For readers of The Will of the Many, The Traitor Baru Cormorant, and The Raven Scholar.