Those Who Rise in Crimson

She survived the arena. She survived the palace. She survived learning what she was built to be.Now she has to finish it.Wei Lian is officially a member of the Dragon Emperor's Sacred Guard — which means she's inside the most dangerous court in the Empire, sworn to protect the man she still needs to destroy, and answering to an ancient vampire who has known what she is since before she was born.She can live with that.What she can't live with is the name she found on the last page of a book no one was supposed to survive reading.Her best friend Mei is alive.Finding her means crossing the Empire's eastern edge, walking into a trap a century in the making, and riding toward a mountain where everything — the divine compact, the Emperor's immortality, the bloodline that makes Lian either the most powerful person in the room or the most useful weapon in history — will be decided once and for all.She won't be going alone.Shen Zhi — the man who came back from six years of silence with explanations that were almost good enough — is riding east with her. Every mile strips back another layer of the wall between them, and what's underneath it is something neither of them has the vocabulary for yet.Zhao Yan — the Emperor's brilliant, morally complicated, entirely changed son — is riding east too. He spent twenty years performing the wrong person. He's done performing. Whatever he is now, it's entirely and dangerously real.And at the centre of the mountain, Lord Kui is waiting. Patient. Ancient. Holding the key to a ritual that doesn't just want to use Wei Lian's power.It wants to use her up.She came to find her friend.She stayed to break an empire.She never planned on having to choose between the world and the two men who would burn it down for her.But then again — she never plans on anything. She just hits harder every time she falls.