Bought with Blood (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798196068607)

Caine has spent longer than any man should alive in a world that has never known what to do with him. He has been a weapon for kings, governments, churches, and frightened men with clean hands. He has been used, feared, buried in files, dragged out of shadows, and pointed at enemies too dangerous for ordinary violence. By the beginning of 2014, after the ruin left behind by Lyra and the Field of Names, he is not looking for redemption, comfort, or peace. He is moving because standing still would mean admitting there is nowhere left to go.

Then Ellie enters his life on a lonely road and refuses to behave like someone who has been warned.

She is practical where others are reverent, stubborn where others are afraid, and sharp enough to see that the stories around Caine are not the whole truth. She does not mistake him for safe, but she also does not treat him as only a monster. Against every instinct he has spent centuries trusting, Caine stays near her, and what begins as accident slowly becomes the one thing he never expected to have again: a reason to remain.

But a quiet life is not easily built from violent hands. Old names still follow him. Old handlers still remember what he can do. The world beyond the orchard road has not forgotten the shape of him, and peace becomes something fragile, guarded, and constantly tested. A house, a locked shed, rain on the roof, a woman who will not be managed by fear, and the possibility of a child all become part of a life Caine does not know how to deserve but will protect with everything he is.

Bought with Blood follows Caine in the years after loss and before legend hardens again, tracing the dangerous, intimate space between grief and family. It is a dark supernatural novel about violence, devotion, ordinary life, and the cost of building a home when the past is still alive enough to knock at the door.

For readers of the Caine novels, this is the bridge between Lyra and the Field of Names and Caine - Godkiller: the story of how a man made for blood found a fragile peace, and why losing it would one day break the world open.