He didn't choose her. She chose him. That's how he'd describe it if you asked. Eight years ago, in the night that follows a hard day, a girl with dark hair and violet eyes walked into his mind and refused to leave. He tried to ignore her. He had reasons — practical ones, the kind that make sense in daylight. He had a life that didn't look like the life of someone who writes about ancient prophecies and slow-burning love and girls discovering they were never broken, just unrecognized. He told himself she wasn't ready. He told himself he wasn't the right one. He set her aside and came back to her and set her aside again, and every time he came back she was still there, still waiting, with the patience of someone who knows how the story ends even if you don't. What he knows is this: Ariadne Hawthorne is the most real person he has never met. He knows how she takes her coffee and what she sounds like when she's angry and the exact way her chin lifts when she's decided something that will not be changed. He has written her in the late hours when the world went quiet, and in those hours she has been more present to him than most people he has known in daylight. He built a life and kept her alive in the margins of it — through a decade of doubt and distraction and the thousand ordinary reasons a person finds not to finish something that matters. He hopes he has done her justice. Jack Cruse lives in the American heartland. He rides his motorcycle when the weather allows and writes when it doesn't. He believes the best love stories are the ones that cost something — and that a woman who knows her own power is the most dangerous and necessary thing in the world. He is currently serializing Everwind on Readerful, while the CovenWood series — beginning with The Secret in the Shadows — moves toward release. More worlds are waiting in the wings. Some are ready. Some are not. All of them are his. It will not be the last.