They burned an entire house to erase this power. Nobody told the empire it survived. Kael was seven and starving when a guard's hand closed around his arm, and something forbidden reached back. Adopted by a noble family who wanted nothing but a son, he hides in plain sight at the empire's most prestigious academy: a quiet swordsman no one looks at twice. Beneath the blade sleeps the one magic the Crown outlawed above all others, the power to take a mind and make it kneel. Every mind he touches obeys him. Every mind he touches never fully leaves. With a relentless Crown investigator closing in, a rival he never meant to befriend, and a girl who doesn't know what he carries, Kael is running out of places to hide. And the more he learns about the house he came from, the less sure he is that it fell for the reasons the empire gave.