A political espionage fantasy trilogy
Every kingdom tells itself a story about who it is. Areth’s story is honor — oaths, transparency, a warrior culture that prides itself on truth as strength. It is mostly true. It is not the whole truth.
Beneath that story runs the Veiled Hand: Areth’s covert intelligence service, the deliberate shadow to everything the kingdom claims to be. Kira Sawyer has served it since she was sixteen — a woman built for the quiet, deniable work that keeps a nation’s hands clean in daylight. She is good at her job. She has never had to ask what it costs her, because she has never let herself stop long enough to look.
That changes the night her partner dies in her arms.
What begins as one operative’s search for answers becomes something far larger: a manufactured war, a conspiracy running through the highest levels of Areth’s own crown, and a truth that reaches further than Kira — or anyone hunting her — is prepared for. As the evidence mounts, she is forced to become the very thing her service trained her to fight: someone who no longer knows which hand is guiding her, or whether the truth she’s chasing will save her kingdom or burn it down.
Shadows of Dominion is a three-book saga of loyalty, betrayal, and the price of seeing clearly in a world built on beautifully maintained lies — for readers who love morally grey operatives, political conspiracies with real teeth, and fantasy where the war is fought in shadows long before it reaches a battlefield.
Book One: The Veiled Hand
Book Two: The Sunlit Court
Book Three: The Open Hand
The Veiled Hand – Book 1
An assassination gone wrong. A dead partner. A secret that could burn two kingdoms to the ground.
Kira Sawyer has served the Veiled Hand — Areth’s covert intelligence service — since she was sixteen. She is good at the quiet work: the surveillance, the extractions, the missions that never happened. She has never had to ask what it costs her, because she has never let herself stop long enough to look.
That changes in Knightfell, when a routine assassination collapses into an ambush that kills the man she loves and leaves her holding a magically encrypted scroll no one was supposed to find.
She should hand it over. Report it. Let the Veiled Hand do what it does.
Instead, her own handler goes still at the sight of it — and tells her to forget it ever existed.
That’s when Kira understands: whatever this is, it isn’t coming from Candor. It’s coming from home.
As she digs deeper, the ground gives way beneath her. Evidence burns. Allies vanish. A death mark is placed on her entire team by the very organization she’s sworn her life to. Both kingdoms brand her a traitor, and every bounty hunter between two borders wants her face. Somewhere above the man giving her orders, someone has been quietly building a war — and Kira is the only one who knows it’s built on lies.
She doesn’t know who to trust. She doesn’t know how far this goes.
She’s about to find out the hard way.
The Veiled Hand is Book One of Shadows of Dominion, a political espionage fantasy trilogy for readers who love morally grey operatives, conspiracies with real teeth, and a heroine who has to become something dangerous to survive the truth.