Overview

Each book in this series is a different couple and a complete happily ever after.

Joon-hee Park has not grieved her sister, has not wanted anything for herself, and has not let her body rest since the morning Bora's soul failed to come home three years ago. The mountain needs her operational. The matriarch needs her exact. Joon-hee has consecrated every breath she takes to a sister she could not save and a temple she will defend until her body forgets how to hold a human shape.

Then the granddaughter of a fifty-year-old exile climbs the temple gate at four A.M. carrying a sealed mudang robe and an inheritance her halmeoni carried in silence for fifty years, and Joon-hee's tiger — silent for three years — wants for the first time since the funeral.

Mira Sato-Park is a Berkeley anthropology PhD who came to Korea to finish her grandmother's unfinished story. She has frameworks for everything in her life except the temple-warrior trying to remove her from a ridge — and the way her grandmother's robe hums every time that woman is near.

The robe's embroidery is the lineage's only key to identifying what has been stealing the mountain's dead. An exiled shamanic order has already moved an operative onto the ridge. The matriarch will rule on the bond at the heaven-altar before sunrise. Joon-hee's vows forbid bonding outside the lineage. Her grandmother of a fifty-year-dead shaman was exiled for exactly the bond Mira is now asking her to claim.

The vow Joon-hee swore was made in 1972. The mountain is asking the lineage to translate. Two women have one night to find out what the new translation costs.