She heals in secret. He’s dying — and he hates everything she stands for. The war just sealed them in the same room.
Surgeon-Lieutenant Sara Vael has spent fourteen years hiding what she is. In an empire that cages healers like her — menders whose gift burns away their own lives with every wound they close — the safest place to hide a forbidden power is behind a licensed scalpel. She has perfected being unseen. It has kept her alive. It has also kept her alone.
Then a void battle floods her medbay with the wounded and one captured enemy: Tovan Reach, a dying rebel commander who believes mercy from the Accord is just a slower kind of cage — and who sees straight through her the moment they meet.
When an engineered plague locks them inside a quarantine ward — alongside a soft-voiced officer harvesting the dying for reasons no one will name — Sara must break every rule she’s survived by to keep Tovan breathing. But every life she saves spends a little more of her own. And the closer they fall, the clearer it becomes: someone built this trap to make a healer choose between her secret and her heart.
Enemies to lovers. Forced proximity. A healer who won’t be saved, and the patient who refuses to let her burn alone.
Some mercies cost everything.
The Mender of the Meridian is Book One of The Mercy Lines — a steamy, standalone science-fantasy medical romance with a guaranteed happily-ever-after.
