She came for a pest control call. He came to save a dying world. Neither of them was prepared for Cincinnati.

Maren Voss has a simple professional philosophy: most things labeled as problems are just creatures in the wrong place. Nine years of pest control in Cincinnati has left her practical, direct, and entirely unequipped for the six-foot-four Fae prince she finds hyperventilating behind a bronze statue in Eden Park at 2 AM.

Caelindor of House Ashvane has twelve hours of preparation for the mortal world and two weeks to find a cure for the Wither, a grey silence spreading through his realm and consuming everything it touches. What his briefing failed to adequately convey: the iron city will try to kill him. The streetlights are aggressive. The toaster is remarkable. And the pest control specialist who refuses to let him die in a park is the most competent person he has ever met.

Maren doesn't believe in magic. She believes in evidence, documentation, and not losing jobs. But when a dead plant on her desk blooms overnight and a man with impossible eyes holds a chain-link fence burn with quiet dignity, the evidence starts going somewhere she didn't plan for.

With ten days until his crossing window seals permanently, a brother who sent him to fail, and a city made of the one substance that can destroy him, Cael needs Maren's knowledge of Cincinnati's iron wilds far more than his two hundred years of Fae training. And Maren, who has been sufficient for a long time, is beginning to understand that sufficient is not the same as this.

The Iron Wilds is a slow-burn contemporary fantasy romance about two people finding the architecture of extraordinary things inside ordinary days, the records kept by people who file unusual things, and the stubborn, persistent hope of living things that grow through concrete.

It is also about a toaster. The toaster is important.