Novels by Nova Thorne

The house we built was made of glass, cedar, and light. It sat on twenty acres of private, wooded land in upstate New York, far away from the concrete canyons of the city, the flashing cameras of the press, and the shadows of Thorne Tower. There were no armed guards standing in the corners of the living room. There were no biometric locks on the bedroom doors. There was just the sound of the wind in the pines, and the crackle of the fireplace. I stood in my massive, sun-drenched studio on the second floor. The wall facing the lake was entirely made of windows. I was painting, but it was slow work. I had to stand back from the canvas because my nine-month pregnant belly kept getting in the way of the easel. I pressed a hand to my stomach as a sharp, sudden kick jabbed against my ribs. "Easy, little one," I murmured, rubbing the spot. "I know you're running out of room in there, but masterpieces take patience." The heavy oak door of the studio creaked open. "Are you lecturing my d

Julian stared at the little plastic stick in my trembling hand.The harsh bathroom light reflected off the small digital screen. The word PREGNANT was stark and black, leaving no room for interpretation.For a long, agonizing moment, the air in the loft seemed to vanish. Julian didn’t move. He didn’t breathe. The man who had faced down hit squads, dismantled the Consortium, and outsmarted the FBI without a drop of sweat looked completely and utterly terrified."Julian?" I whispered. My voice cracked. "Say something. Please."He blinked. Once. Twice. The shock in his icy blue eyes began to shatter, replaced by something so raw and overwhelming it made my breath hitch.The digital test slipped from my fingers and clattered into the porcelain sink.Julian didn't catch it. Instead, his knees buckled.The billionaire CEO, the ruthless predator of Wall Street, dropped to the tile floor right in front of me. He wrapped his strong arms around my waist and buried his face against my stomach. I

Four days had passed since I walked out of the federal detention center.Four days of peace. Four days of Julian working from a laptop on the sofa while I painted by the window. It was the longest stretch of uninterrupted quiet we had experienced since the day we met.But my body didn't seem to understand that we were safe.I was standing at the easel, mixing a beautiful, stormy blue on my palette. I leaned in to add a drop of turpentine to thin the oil.The sharp, chemical smell hit the back of my throat.Usually, I loved that smell. It was the scent of my sanctuary.Today, it made my stomach violently heave.I dropped the palette knife. I slapped a hand over my mouth and sprinted for the bathroom, barely making it to the toilet before I lost the toast I had forced down for breakfast.I sat on the cool tile floor, gasping for breath, my forehead resting against the porcelain."Vivian?"Elena’s voice echoed from the main room. She had come over to bring us lunch—a spread of sashimi fr

I woke up to the smell of coffee and turpentine.For a moment, I panicked. I didn't recognize the ceiling. It wasn't the ornate plaster of the penthouse bedroom. It was exposed timber beams and white-painted brick.Then I remembered.The heist. The helicopter. The cell. The release.I rolled over.Julian was sitting on the floor near the window. He was wearing gray sweatpants and a white t-shirt. He was barefoot. He held a mug in one hand and was staring at the unfinished painting on the easel—the one I had started before Elias invaded my life.He looked peaceful. The tension that usually vibrated off him like a hum in a high-voltage wire was gone."You're staring at it like it's a spreadsheet," I croaked, my voice raspy from sleep.Julian turned. A slow smile spread across his face."I'm trying to figure out the lighting," he said. "The shadows don't make sense physically, but emotionally... they are perfect."I sat up. My body ached. The metal bench in the holding cell had left brui

The Javits Center was a riot.I watched the live feed on a stolen tablet in the back of the van as we sped toward the Lincoln Tunnel.On screen, Elias Vane was trying to shout over the confusion."Deepfakes!" Elias screamed, pointing at the massive screen behind him where his own voice was still echoing. "AI manipulation! That is not my voice! That is a fabrication created by a desperate criminal!"But the crowd wasn't listening. They were booing. Investors were frantically typing on their phones, dumping Vanguard stock.Then, I saw movement in the wings of the stage.Agent Miller walked out. He wasn't alone. He was flanked by six federal agents.Elias saw them. He stopped shouting. He looked for an exit, but the stage was surrounded.Miller walked up to the podium. He didn't speak into the microphone. He just placed a hand on Elias’s shoulder.He spun Elias around.Click.Handcuffs.The crowd erupted. Flashbulbs went supernova. The golden boy of Silicon Valley was being perp-walked o

Dante Moretti’s safe house wasn't a bunker. It was a penthouse in DUMBO overlooking the East River. It was filled with modern art, expensive whiskey, and illegal firearms.I paced the floor. I felt like a caged tiger.On the massive television screen, the news played on a loop."Vivian Thorne, wife of fugitive billionaire Julian Thorne, was arraigned in federal court this morning. The judge denied bail, citing her husband's flight as evidence of a significant flight risk."The screen showed footage of Vivian being led out of the courthouse. She wore an orange jumpsuit. Her hands were cuffed to her waist. She looked pale, but her head was high. She didn't hide her face from the cameras.I threw my glass of whiskey at the wall.Crash.The crystal shattered, spraying amber liquid over a priceless Basquiat print."Easy, tiger," Dante drawled from the leather sofa. "That painting cost more than your helicopter ride.""She's in a cage because of me," I roared. "I left her there, Dante! I ju

BOOK SIX: THE IRON CROWN(Jace’s Perspective)Fanaticism is a poor substitute for structural integrity. A man who believes he is destined to win will happily ignore the fact that the bridge beneath his feet is crumbling.The Imperial squad leader knelt in the toxic, frozen mud of the ash-wastes, his mind pinned to the earth by the sheer, crushing psychic weight of Elias’s Alpha command. But even as the blood dripped from his nose, the soldier looked up at me with a twisted, manic grin."You can take the water," the soldier hissed, his voice rattling in his chest. "You can kill us all. It doesn't matter, Architect. Commander Vane already has the engine. The Iron Crown will shatter your glass tower by midnight.""Commander Vane," Cord rumbled, stepping forward, his massive hand resting on the haft of his Starved Iron sledgehammer. The old Master Forge spat into the ash. "He was the Emperor’s Chief Siege Master. I thought Torin ripped his throat out during the palace breach.""He missed

BOOK SIX: THE IRON CROWN(Jace’s Perspective)The western ash-wastes didn't look like a battlefield. They looked like the end of the world.Fourteen years ago, the magma nodes beneath this section of the continent had been completely severed. Without the deep heat of the earth to sustain the soil, the land had literally died. The sky was permanently choked with a thick, irradiated gray dust that tasted like rusted copper. There were no trees, no rivers, no sound. Just miles of jagged, frozen gray mud.I stood at the vanguard of the formation, my heavy leather coat pulled tight against the biting, toxic wind.Behind me stood three hundred of the most lethal predators on the planet. The Vanguard wolves weren't in their human forms. They had fully shifted, towering at nine feet tall. Their pristine, blindingly white fur cut through the gray fog like localized beacons of starlight. They hovered inches above the dead soil, entirely unaffected by the heavy, toxic sludge of the wastes.Torin

BOOK SIX: THE IRON CROWN(Jace’s Perspective)It had been six months since I drove a spike of celestial silver into the beating heart of the abyss. Six months since the Mariana Trench was sealed beneath a mile of volcanic glass, and the wolves reclaimed their lunar frequency.For half a year, the world had been violently, aggressively peaceful.I stood in the center of a massive construction site in the heart of Aethelgard. The air smelled of wet mortar, freshly cut pine from the Jagged Coast, and the clean, rhythmic hiss of localized steam engines. We weren't building walls or foundries. We were building the Aethelgard Academy of Elemental Physics."The structural load on the western arch is leaning," I said, pointing a pale, silver-veined finger at the massive stone colonnade being erected fifty yards away.Corren, standing beside me with a rolled-up blueprint tucked under his arm, squinted at the archway. The old miner rubbed his jaw. "It’s within standard engineering tolerances, J

BOOK FIVE: THE LUNAR ECLIPSE(Jace’s Perspective)There is a strange, quiet terror in winning a war that lasted ten thousand years. When you have spent your entire life calculating the structural integrity of your walls, you don't know what to do with your hands once the enemy finally stops knocking.I sat on the edge of my bed in the Grandmaster’s private quarters at the top of the Spire. The arched windows were thrown wide open. The sky over Aethelgard was a brilliant, flawless blue. The bruised-purple steam was completely gone.I looked down at my hands.My left arm was heavily scarred, the permanently cooked veins running beneath the skin a dormant, matte black. It felt incredibly heavy, perfectly attuned to the steady, comforting thump-thump of the earth's deep magma nodes pulsing miles beneath the city.My right arm was pale, the veins glowing with a faint, steady silver luminescence. It felt weightless, completely untethered from the planet, humming with the cold, silent freque

BOOK FIVE: THE LUNAR ECLIPSE(Jace’s Perspective)Falling into a volcano is certain death. Falling into an ocean trench is certain death. Falling into a place where the two are violently grinding against each other is a statistical impossibility.I plummeted through the dead center of the boiling, ten-mile-wide vortex. Because Torin was running the circumference at Mach 3, the sheer centrifugal force had ripped all the oxygen and steam out of the center. I was falling through a perfect, frictionless vacuum tube, straight down to the tectonic floor.Beneath me, the Hive-Mind’s physical core—a massive, beating heart of hyper-compressed black water and jagged basalt—pulsed wildly.It felt me coming.The velvet shadow of its psychic weight slammed into my mind, trying to crush my consciousness before I even reached the bottom. But the psychic attack didn't hit the heavy, earthly iron of the Architect. It hit the celestial silver coursing through the right half of my brain.The Hive-Mind r

BOOK FIVE: THE LUNAR ECLIPSE(Jace’s Perspective)Water only acts as a wall if you give it the time to absorb your mass. If you remove the mass and exponentially increase the velocity, the ocean stops being a liquid and becomes a perfectly flat, indestructible highway.We stood on the precipice of the Jagged Coast. The sky above us was rapidly darkening as the suffocating, bruised-purple steam of the Hive-Mind’s evaporation engine rolled over the continent. The temperature of the air was spiking, tasting like burnt salt and ozone.Torin stood at the edge of the cliff, his blindingly white, nine-foot-tall lunar frame casting a pristine glow against the encroaching dark.I didn't wear the Obsidian Chassis. It was a melted, ruined husk locked in the Vault. Instead, I wore a standard, tailored Grandmaster’s coat, reinforced with a lightweight Starved Iron mesh.I held the heavy iron grappling hook in my left hand—the hand still bound entirely to the heavy, crushing physics of the earthly g