The Seven Anchors-The Sovereign's Tether

SHE WAS NEVER SUPPOSED TO BE FOUND.On the night of his daughter's first birthday, Hamza Demirtaş comes home expecting a quiet celebration.Instead, he finds his wife dead.His one-year-old daughter, Alice, is gone.The scene makes no sense. The steel doorframe has been torn outward as if something impossibly strong forced its way through. The electricity died at the exact moment of the attack. There is almost no blood. And the apartment is unnaturally cold.The police want a simple explanation.Hamza knows better.Desperate to find his daughter before the trail goes cold, he begins following the fragments his wife's unfinished investigation left behind-missing dockworkers, suspicious shipping companies, bloodless bodies, and a network operating beneath Istanbul's respectable surface.Then he meets Omar.Ancient. Wealthy. Unnervingly calm.And not human.Omar has spent thousands of years hiding from the world, bound to a secret that predates modern civilization. Alice is not merely a kidnapped child.She is his Anchor.Every Sovereign has one.A single mortal life tied to their existence.And the bond between Omar and Alice has made her the most valuable target in Istanbul.A vampire syndicate has taken the child for a ritual that could awaken something buried beneath the city. They have seventy-two hours to complete it.Hamza has no supernatural power. No secret training. No idea what kind of war he has just entered.He only has a father's determination to bring his daughter home.Omar has the power to tear reality apart.And neither man yet understands what Alice's existence could mean for the ancient order hiding behind humanity's world.As Istanbul's rain-soaked streets give way to forgotten vaults beneath the city, Hamza and Omar are forced into an uneasy alliance against enemies…