Blood Debts and Dragon Bones: The Thief Who Stole Death

"I stole from Death. Now I AM Death. And the god I robbed wants me dead—or worse, wants me back." Shattered Realms has the best thieves, and Kaida Thornwick is one of them. For five years, she's been stealing to pay off her younger sister's life debt to the Crimson Cartel. And she has to be. One more big score, and Mira goes free. The job is easy, but it looks impossible: break into the Hollow Citadel, take the Bone Crown from Death's vault, and give it to her unknown client. No one has ever taken something from a god. So Kaida is willing to give it a shot. She does well. She does indeed pull it off. Then Death himself shows up in her hiding place, but he's not what the stories said he would be. Tall, devastatingly beautiful, and totally furious, Azrael the Soul-Keeper offers her a choice: return what she stole, or he'll drag her to the afterlife immediately. She can't return it, though. The Bone Crown has fused with her skull, designating her as Death's Heir—the human picked to take over his divine role when he dies. And there's a problem: Death isn't meant to have an heir. The Crown was sealed away ages ago for a reason. By stealing it, Kaida has sparked an ancient failsafe. Now she and Azrael are bonded—sharing thoughts, feelings, and life force. When she bleeds, he feels it. When he reaps souls, she experiences their final moments. They have thirty days before the bond completes and Kaida becomes the new Death, trapping Azrael in mortal form and sending him to eventual human death. Neither of them wants this. But breaking the bond needs something impossible: stealing three pieces of Azrael's true name from the three most dangerous beings in the Realms—a fallen god, a nightmare queen, and the mystery client who hired Kaida in the first place. As they're forced into an unwilling partnership, pulling off increasingly impossible heists while the divine world hunts them, Kaida learns three terrible truths: The client who hired her is Azrael's old enemy, engineering this to destroy him. Her sister's life-debt is linked to a conspiracy that reaches back to the Divine Sundering itself. And Azrael didn't just lose his crown—he WANTED someone to steal it, because being Death has become a jail he's desperate to escape, even if it means dying to do so. The best thief in the Realms stole immortality. Now she has to steal something even harder—a future where neither of them has to die alone.