The Promise

Fifty-six days ago, Ellyce Jensen's father vanished. Tonight, two men are tearing her house apart looking for what he left behind-and she's hiding in his closet, seventeen and completely alone.

Ellyce was never supposed to be anyone special. Her mother walked out when she was four. The popular girls made sure she never forgot it. All she ever wanted was a simple, ordinary life.

But her father wasn't an ordinary man. Thomas Jensen wrote novels about prophecy and hidden worlds, and now Ellyce is learning they were never fiction. He left her a key. A riddle. A stack of manuscripts that turn out to be maps. And a promise made before she was born-she is the last heir of a broken Kingdom, destined to reunite the fractured realms before a centuries-old war finally breaks loose.

She doesn't want any of it. What she wants is Benson-her ex-best friend, the boy who walked away without a word and somehow knows far more than he should. The boy who's with Sydney Parker now, of all people. Ellyce is sure Benson is part of her story. She's sure of a lot of things.

She has no idea how wrong she is.

The choice was never whether the realms were real. It's whether she's brave enough to fulfill her father's promise-or walk away and watch everything she loves fall to darkness.

There will be a war. There will be a wedding. Choose whom you will serve.