I Came to Kill You, But I Loved You

Years of civil war have left Kira Gray with nothing. Her family was branded traitors and killed for it, and the only thing that keeps her getting up is the promise she made to put a knife in the emperor. The emperor rides out himself to put down the rebellion and walks into an ambush laid for him. He is cut badly, unconscious, and left where he falls. Kira finds him without knowing who he is and keeps him alive. He wakes up in her care and does not volunteer his name. They are both wrecked people and the weeks of tending wounds and sharing food do what she never planned for, and she stops thinking about the vow every hour. Then she learns whose face she has been looking at. The man she nursed and came to love gave the order that wiped out her household. Everything she has told him since the day she found him now sits between them, and the knife she carried for years is still hers to use.