First Grade

“Don’t cry,” my mother tells me. I am in first grade, with a pretty knapsack and a lunch she packed me, and first grade always made me cry. “But I want to stay with you.” It was, to my five-year-old self, the most dramatic thing that I had to spend the whole day away from her, and I didn’t understand it. “You’ll be home soon.” -- “Don’t cry,” my mother tells me. It’s a habit that, as a twenty-something year old woman, I pretend I had grown out of. I’m sitting on her couch writing poetry – a piece from San Francisco that would one day become a friend’s housewarming present – and airplanes always made me cry. “I’ll just miss you, that’s all.” “You’ll be home in a few months.” None of us could have predicted a fucking pandemic that had probably already started, or known the next time I’d come back would be almost two years later. -- “I told you not to cry,” but I know she is also crying. She has stage four colorectal cancer, and we both wrote a piece with the exact sam...
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Lady Shadow

Here is a little secret. Assassins do exist. They're right here, in the kingdoms.

And the one they're looking for? The mercenary who betrayed them?

She lives.

***

Betrayal is a death sentence—and Umbra makes a living at it.

When she was nine years old, Umbra was trained to be a mercenary. They are silent shadows with faces of men: ruthless combat masters, and Umbra was the best among them. Trained to swear fealty to assassins no one else believes in, sworn to die by her own hand before she dares betray them, Umbra becomes the spearhead of the assassins’ revolution: a hidden war to claim the kingdoms.

But what if she was wrong? What if she misjudged them?

So she changes sides, falling overnight from the deadliest assassin to the woman at the top of their most-wanted list. To the woman who, singlehandedly, is preventing the assassins from attaining the position she once killed to help them claim.

Now Umbra must confront the machinations of her past, from the old assassin masters who taught her everything, to the assassin heir and the man she would have married. But one aspect of her life might be too sharp to overcome. One betrayal runs too deeply to be reckoned with.

Because you don't cross the Kai Assassins and walk away unscathed.

Sometimes, you don't walk away.

Get Your Copy Here! :)

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