Untethered (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798177844398)

UNTETHERED
Book One of the Kope River Series

Two rival houses. A bond neither of them chose. A secret that's been rotting the treaty from the inside for nineteen years.

Akosua Adjei-Kome holds her house's claim by a naming her own tradition wasn't built to allow - a woman leading a line that's supposed to pass to a man, propped up only by a regency that's run three times longer than anyone expected. Kwame Boateng won his seat at nineteen and has spent seven years performing a certainty he's never actually felt. Their houses have hated each other since a killing at the river no one living actually witnessed - each side certain, for nineteen years, that they know exactly who to blame.

Then the old law wakes up. A binding Tether - blood, soil, and a rite neither house has invoked in living memory - forces their fates together the moment a spreading sickness starts stripping shifters back to something that no longer recognizes its own name. They can't survive the outbreaks apart. They're not sure they can survive each other, either.

What starts as forced proximity becomes something far more dangerous than either of them is prepared for - and the closer they get, the clearer it becomes that the story both houses were raised on was never the whole truth. Someone has been watching them long enough to know exactly which wound would cut deepest. And when Akosua finds the proof, planted in her own house's colors, there's no walking away from the bond - or from him.