A disinherited knight's bastard son must recover a relic from a plague-cursed city—or lose everything to his half-brother's blade.
London, 1888. Alfred Victor, a bankrupt printer's son scraping by as a dockworker, discovers a manuscript hidden in a crate of scrap paper. It teaches "Ink-Binding" - the art of writing contracts that, when signed, bind the soul. The ink itself becomes a weapon. The written word can kill.
When an earl dies intestate, a London barrister discovers the true heir was raised in a traveling circus—and the false heir will kill to keep the title.
A female codebreaker in 1943 London intercepts a German transmission that predicts her own death—and must decode who among her colleagues sent it.