The King's Last Dark. Royal Historical Fantasy fiction - Aria Thorne

For three hundred years, no woman sent to Duskmere as tribute has returned. Aeryn Thessavane does not intend to be the next name carved into the memorial wall, but when she arrives at the obsidian palace and finds not a monster but a king caught between man and beast, holding a boundary she does not yet understand, she makes a choice that should have been impossible.

She stays.

What follows is not a rescue. It is a negotiation between a woman who refuses to be prey and a king who has forgotten he was ever anything else, conducted in a dead language, across a workroom table, in a garden of flowers that bloom in no light at all.

The curse can be broken. Aeryn has found the terms. The cost is permanent, the choice is irrevocable, and it has to be hers. She already knows what she is going to do. *Some things that survive long enough in the dark develop the ability to make their own light