Power was never the danger. Want was.
On Samhain night, with treachery seated beside the throne and the dead stirring beneath the House of Faces, Macha felt him at her back—steady, lethal, far too close. She was meant to hold Ulaid together, not crave the man sworn to protect her. But desire turned every choice into something dangerous.
Ruairi had already crossed death once. Macha was far more dangerous.
Macha stood before him with fire in her eyes while Ulaid cracked apart around her, and every vow he’d sworn strained toward breaking. He was her blade, her shield, the last thing standing between her and the darkness rising through the court. He was never meant to want her like this.
The dead had always spoken to Breda. She never expected them to speak his name.
As the House of Faces began to fracture, the whispers pulled her toward truths long buried within Ulaid—and toward a shadowed man who felt more like a warning than salvation. The dead were no longer content to whisper.
Cian lived with the damage he helped create—and the woman he could not save.
Old magic bound him to grief, guilt, and a past that refused to stay buried. Love had failed them before. It might fail them again.
As Samhain descends, loyalties fracture, the dead grow restless, and Ulaid begins to unravel.
Review - ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Just finished this and... wow. I'm not quite ready to let these characters go.
I picked this up because the Celtic mythology sounded right up my alley, and it absolutely delivered on that. What I wasn't expecting was how attached I'd become to Macha and Ruairi. Somewhere along the way I stopped trying to piece together every mystery and just wanted them to be okay.
I swear I didn't trust a single person in Ulaid. Every time I thought I'd figured someone out, the story would throw something at me that made me question everything again. And after that opening scene with the druid? Nope. I never trusted him for the rest of the book.
The mythology was easily one of my favourite parts. Magic is woven through every page, but it isn't the kind that's all wonder and beauty. It feels ancient, unpredictable, and sometimes genuinely unsettling. I loved that I never quite knew what was waiting around the next corner.
And can we talk about the House of Faces? I still don't know whether I was fascinated by it or completely creeped out by it. Probably both. Every time it showed up, I knew I needed to pay attention because something memorable was about to happen.
The romance really worked for me too. It was such a slow build, full of longing and all those little moments that made me want to yell at them to just be honest with each other already. Watching Macha and Ruairi slowly realise what they meant to one another was one of my favourite parts of the book.
This is definitely one of those stories that just keeps getting better the further you get into it. I lost count of how many times I said, "Just one more chapter," only to keep reading.
Now I'm sitting here with that weird little book hangover you get after finishing a story you've completely fallen into. I'm already missing these characters, and if Hanna Park ever decides to write more about them, I'll be picking it up immediately.
Hanna Park
I began my writing career in the pre-dawn of a winter morning while my husband snored like a train. We could call my husband the catalyst. If it weren’t for him, I would never have gone to the kitchen to make a pot of coffee, feed the cat, and sit on the loveseat in front of the fire. It was there, in those moments of wondrous quiet, that I did something I had never thought possible. I opened my laptop, and while the coffee went cold, I wrote a story. My husband had no idea that these sojourns to the loveseat in front of the fire would become a daily occurrence, that writing would become an obsession, but the cat knew. She knows everything.
I write stories that make you laugh, make you cry, and make you love. Thank you, friends, for reading!
In the beginning, there was an empty page.
I am a writer who lives in Muskoka, Canada, with a husband who snores, a hungry cat, and an almost perfect canine––he’s an adorable little shit.
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