Two thieves want answers. Riyria is born. . . For more than a year Royce Melborn has tried to forget Gwen DeLancy, the woman who saved him and his partner Hadrian Blackwater from certain death. Unable to get her out of his mind, Royce returns to Medford with Hadrian but the two receive a very different reception -- Gwen refuses to see them. The victim of abuse by a powerful noble, she suspects that Royce will ignore any danger in his desire for revenge. By turning the thieves away, Gwen hopes to once more protect them. What she doesn't realize is what the two are capable of -- but she's about to find out.

Secret agent Augustus Whittlesby has spent a decade undercover in France, posing as a terrible poet. The French spies can't bear to read his work closely enough to recognise the information drowned in a sea of verbiage. Emma Delagardie is a thorn in Augustus' side. An old school friend of Napoleon's stepdaughter, she came to France, eloped with a Frenchman and rattles around the salons of Paris. Now widowed, she holds a weekly salon where she critiques Augustus' poems. But when he hears of a secret invasion plan at Emma's party Augustus must try and get closer to her...