To Kill a Star-Eater

The assassin has no Spark. No divine light. The court calls her Hollow. The underworld calls her useful. Vespera Thorne has spent four years killing on contract for the Void Seekers, invisible to the celestial wards that guard the empire's elite. Her latest target is Cyprian Valerius, the crown prince of Asterveil, host to Sirius Prime, a star-parasite that fell into his body when he was fifteen and has been eating him from the inside ever since. The Ascension window is days away. If Sirius Prime manifests fully, the city burns. The plan is simple: kill the prince, let the Star transfer to a containment array, collect eighteen months off her contract. Vesper has done this twelve times before. She is very good at her job. She stabs him in the chapel. The Star surges to transfer and finds nothing. No Spark, no landing. But it cannot stop. It locks onto the nearest viable anchor, which is the space between them. The tether is born. Twenty feet apart means death for both. If they sleep more than inches apart, the tether tears. The Star screams only they can hear. Now the Void Seekers want the Star for their own weapon. The court wants Cyprian back and Vesper dissected. And the only thing keeping them alive is their proximity, and the strange, unwelcome quiet that settles over the Star when Vesper is near. She is Hollow. He is burning. And the only way to kill the god is for Vesper to become something it cannot eat: not empty, not full of Spark, but chosen. The Anchor must be built from identity-level love, the kind that survives erasure. Cyprian keeps a journal. Every morning he writes down his name, his mother's garden, the scar on his arm. The Star has already taken his mother's face. It will take everything, unless Vesper learns to stop running, and to stay. They flee into the Ash Meridian, a frozen wasteland of star-sick settlements and discarded hosts. The cold is brutal. The fever in his veins is worse. The tether forces them to share body heat, to share nightmares, to share the small, terrifying intimacy of someone reading his own journal back to him because he can no longer remember what he wrote. "You can be afraid and still," his mother once told him. "They are not the same thing." Vesper has never loved anything that wasn't survival. But somewhere between the twenty-foot rule and the dawn conversations, she stops calculating exits. She starts choosing. And when the Star finally manifests, she does the only thing that can stop it: she pulls the parasite into her own Hollow and lets the Anchor, the shape she built from choice and love and staying, burn the god to ash. The Star dissolves. The tether breaks. They are free. The summer flowers bloom in the Ash Meridian. They build a cabin. He writes in his journal: I have never been so happy. Then a new star falls, searching for a host. It finds her. She tells it no. She is not available to be a vessel for anything she did not choose. To Kill a Star-Eater is a complete standalone YA romantasy. Perfect for readers of Divine Rivals, A Court of Thorns and Roses, and The Cruel Prince. Forced proximity. Body horror. A slow-burn romance that survives a god's hunger. And a Hollow who learns that emptiness is not the end, it's the beginning of choice.