Adult

Callis Vale ran away from a gilded cage to become a frontier hero. The frontier answered by beating him half to death in the mud.
    Hartsgate is a brutal trade town on the edge of the Green March, a place that survives by turning danger into coin. It has no use for noble blood, polished manners, or expensive education. Out here, a boy who can’t hold a spear, read a contract, or survive the road is just another future casualty.
    Broke, freezing, and dangerously out of his depth, Callis survives his first days not through talent or destiny, but through the women who actually keep Hartsgate alive: the innkeeper whose husband drinks away the profits, the armorer whose skill is treated like a commodity, the clerks, traders, and widows who hold the town together while the men around them rot, rage, or die.
    At first, their attention buys him only what he needs most: shelter, food, advice, and a reason to keep going. But in a town built on interlocking systems, intimacy is never just intimacy. Every bed hides a secret. Every marriage conceals a fracture. Every woman Callis wins trust from gives him access to another corner of Hartsgate’s real power.
    What begins as survival turns into something far more dangerous. Callis is no longer just bedding lonely wives—he is building a network inside the town’s kitchens, forges, shrines, and counting rooms. And as the monsters of the Elderforest press closer and suspicious husbands begin to notice, the web keeping him alive may be the same one that gets him killed.