Asher Vane is a Fate Inker — one of the rare gifted few who can see the soul marks that bind the destined together, and tattoo them into being. He’s spent three centuries inking those marks into other people’s skin while a curse forbids him a single one of his own. He’s watched a thousand strangers fall into forever. He stopped believing he’d ever have it. 

Then Maren Locke walks into his shop in Prague. 

She’s mortal. She knows nothing of magic. And on the inside of her wrist she wears a soul mark drawn in his own unmistakable hand — one he has no memory of making. The instant their eyes meet, ink blooms across his skin for the first time in three hundred years, and the pull between them is immediate, consuming, impossible to resist. 

Fate says Maren belongs to him. But she has spent her whole life certain that her choices are hers alone, and she won’t let a mark she never chose — or the maddening, silver-eyed man who made it — decide who she’s allowed to love. 

Asher will give her the truth. The city. Every guarded piece of himself he’s hidden for centuries. The one thing he can’t give her is a shortcut — because a bond taken instead of freely given is the very sin that cursed him, and the Guild that punished him once is watching to see how this ends. 

Some bonds are written by fate. 

This one has to be chosen. 

The Fate Inker’s Torment is the second standalone in the Watcher’s Guild Chronicles — a steamy, open-door romantic fantasy of immortal longing, stubborn free will, and a love worth breaking a curse for. Every book, a new couple and a new curse. HEA guaranteed. No cheating. No cliffhanger.