Pitch:

A PROMISE OF FIRE meets THE WITCHER.

After a band of mercenaries kills her family and attempts to kidnap her, curse-marked Kara joins up with a rival mercenary clan in hopes of exacting revenge, not expecting to fall for her deadly commander. But when Kara learns her brother is still alive and has been taken captive by her clan, she must choose between saving him and betraying the man she’s grown to love.

Excerpt:

The molten heat of the forge buffeted Kara’s face as she reached into it with her tongs. She gripped the glowing horseshoe and pulled it out, transferring it to the anvil. Kara yanked the hammer from the pocket of her leather apron, choking the wood in her fist as she began striking the shoe into shape. The fires of the forge growled low behind her. A fat drop of rain fell from the sky and struck the metal, sizzling out of existence. Kara glanced up and scowled. The horizon was pregnant with dark grey clouds.

Da and her brother Wesley had left at dawn to go hunting. Now she was stuck shoeing her former lover’s horse, a task Da usually did so she could avoid Sean after he’d broken things off between them.

‘We’re just different people,’ he’d said, by which he meant that she was cursed and he wasn’t, that he got to have a normal life and she didn’t. He was fine to fuck her when no one knew about it, but once the villagers started gossiping, he’d dropped her like a hot coal.

Kara would’ve canceled the job altogether, but her family sorely need the coin. She swung the hammer again as the sky began to spit harder, striking the soft metal too hard and bending it out of shape. “Fucking hell.”