When Tara begins picking up extra shifts—longer hours, late nights, anything to avoid confronting the growing distance between her and Jax—she frames it as responsibility. But it’s really escape. The hospital becomes the place where she doesn’t have to look at him, doesn’t have to talk through the fractures neither of them want to acknowledge. With her gone so often, they hire a nanny.
Lola Calder arrives at the Yellowstone Ranch with a reputation for being the best hand anyone’s ever seen. A former military sniper with unmatched skill, she works hard, rides even harder, and brings a rare warmth that the bunkhouse quickly grows to love. Despite surviving unthinkable hardships in her past, she remains bright, funny, and fiercely loyal. When Kayce Dutton returns to the bunkhouse after his marriage falls apart, he doesn’t expect someone like Lola.
Set after the deaths of Laena Velaryon and Laenor Velaryon, House of the Dragon enters the fragile stretch just before open war. Rhaenyra Targaryen and Daemon Targaryen rule Dragonstone together, united in purpose. At their center stands Princess Visenya Targaryen—Rhaenyra’s named heir, Daemon’s favored daughter, and the one the Greens fear most.
Princess Visenya Targaryen is born in 104 AC, the second daughter of King Viserys I Targaryen and Queen Aemma Arryn, seven years after her sister, Rhaenyra Targaryen. On the night of her birth, as a violent storm rages over Dragonstone, an ancient dragon egg placed beside her cradle cracks open. The egg is older than the Targaryen conquest itself, said to have been carried from Valyria before the Doom and left dormant for centuries. No dragonkeeper believes it could ever hatch. Yet before sunrise, a dragon unlike any ever recorded emerges. His scales are blacker than obsidian, threaded with veins of molten gold that glow beneath his hide as though fire flows through his blood. He curls around the infant princess as if protecting her, and from that moment forward the two are inseparable. The dragon is named Valdrakar, an ancient High Valyrian name long thought forgotten, and as he grows, the realm gives him another name entirely: The Fourteenth Flame.