Fibula

Anna has spent a hundred and thirty seven years doing the work she gave her life for. She guides souls, tends her assignment, builds something that feels like home one stone at a time above the Aegean. She is good at being alone. She has had a lot of practice.Hypnos keeps showing up anyway.He appears at her campfire uninvited. He moves her camp without permission. He conjures chairs that are beautiful and completely wrong and cannot understand why she won't keep any of them. He agreed to the terms she set. He is also currently jealous of a woman she spent two hours with behind a tavern and doing a very poor job of pretending otherwise.She told him the terms. He agreed to them. And now here they are.Something has always existed between them. She has known it for years and chosen not to examine it too closely because examining it meant wanting something she was not certain she was going to get to keep. She had loved someone before and walked away because they both wanted different things and she had spent a century quietly carrying that and she was not going to be that exposed again without considerably more certainty than she currently had.But Hypnos is carrying something she cannot fully see yet. Something old and heavy that sits in the pauses of his sentences and behind his eyes when he goes quiet. Something he keeps almost saying and then doesn't. Something that has been building in him for longer than she has known him and is getting heavier by the year.Not yet was not never.She was patient. She had always been patient. She was also getting very tired of being patient about this specific thing.And when he finally tells her the truth, all of it, it is going to change everything she thought she understood about her own life.The Fibula is the second story in The Board series, continuing the mythology and slow burn romance of The Hairpin. Set in 568 AD Greece, it follows Anna and Hypnos across a century of circling each other, and learning what it costs to finally tell the truth to someone who has been waiting for it longer than either of them realized.For readers who love mythology romance, morally complex love interests, slow burn tension that pays off completely, queer characters, and stories where centuries of history press against every single moment two people share.That's when the god of sleep stopped sleeping.