In the unlit south wing of a palace, a former assassin climbs in through a window, soaking wet, and walks straight into the king’s younger sister. Victoria does not scream. She asks whether he has come to see her, informs him that it is exactly thirty-four paces to the washroom door, and corrects him when he takes thirty-five and cracks his knee on the wall. Before she drifts off down the hall she extracts a promise that he will visit again. Asher keeps it. Captive Traitor King by Brigid Kemmerer is full of big things, including a drought, a war and a brother who wants his sister dead, but its truest moments are small ones like this: someone lonely asking for company, and someone damaged discovering he is able to give it.
Captive Traitor King Is a Book About Asking
The setup carries over from Warrior Princess Assassin. Jory, a princess of Astranza, has been sent south to marry Ky, the feared King of Incendar, and has come to believe that her own brother sent killers after them both. Asher, the boy she has loved since childhood, was sold into bondage after his mother’s execution and came back as a Hunter. The three ended the first book bound to one another and to a plan to put Jory on her throne. Now they are stuck in Ky’s capital while he waits for news from his border, and the first rain in years has everyone uneasy.
What Kemmerer does with that pause is let her characters notice how little practice they have at simply asking. Jory spent her childhood scheming for scraps of attention from a cold father and a violent brother, so when she wants Ky to act, her instinct is to send Asher to ambush him. Asher, who for years had no right to refuse anyone, treats every request as an order. The quietest and best thread in Captive Traitor King by Brigid Kemmerer follows Jory discovering ordinary friendship for the first time: a chattering maid who dabs rouge on her cheeks and trades gossip about kitchen romances, and a freckled officer with three older sisters who calmly tells her exactly why his regiment does not trust her.
The Survivor at the Centre
Asher is the book’s achievement. Kemmerer’s author’s note warns that his past is explored in more depth here, and it is, through one harrowing nightmare and through fragments he offers when he can. What makes it work is that the novel is never interested in his suffering as spectacle. It is interested in the details of recovery: how he flinches when anyone touches his face, how being pinned turns into pleading before he can stop it, how he asks someone to keep a hand on his cheek so he can remember what kind touch feels like. The romance that grows among the three of them is explicit and frequent in its second half, and Captive Traitor King by Brigid Kemmerer earns that heat by making consent the subject rather than the formality. Readers who come for a polyamorous arrangement in which all three relationships carry weight will find one, including the two men.
Captain Sev Zale supplies the necessary friction. He thinks his oldest friend is being led by desire into a trap, and he says so. His slow thaw toward Asher, which reaches its peak in a quiet scene in the stables, is one of the most satisfying arcs in the book.
A King Who Is Two Men
Ky is the harder case. He is gentle with the people he loves, the kind of king who fetches a warm cloth when someone is crying on his floor, and in the same chapters he burns a prisoner’s face for information. The novel does not look away from either side, which is honest, but it never quite reconciles them either. Readers who were troubled by his brutality in the first book will find more of it here, presented with more understanding than judgement.
What steadies him is the weather. Incendar has gone years without proper rain, its fields brown and its granaries thin, and the storm that opens the novel is greeted by soldiers and farmers alike with something close to wonder. Captive Traitor King by Brigid Kemmerer keeps returning to that image, rain on iron and mud in a training yard that has been dust for seasons, and it becomes the book’s measure of hope. Where it comes from turns out to matter enormously, and the answer is one of the better-earned surprises in the closing chapters.
The supporting cast lightens all of this. A scholar from the halls of Orraval, sharp-tongued and openly unimpressed by royalty, spars with Ky like an old enemy from their teenage years and pushes Jory toward a discovery about her own gifts. Soldiers needle one another about vomiting on mountain runs. A visit to a disreputable tavern, with Jory playing cards far more ruthlessly than anyone expected, starts as comedy and turns into the most frightening scene in Captive Traitor King by Brigid Kemmerer, when Asher’s past sits down at the table.
Where Captive Traitor King Loses Its Grip
The trouble with a novel about patience is that it can test the reader’s. Captive Traitor King by Brigid Kemmerer has three noticeable faults:
A long run of chapters covering a single evening, almost entirely given over to intimacy and conversation, while the Draeg threat sits offstage.
Late revelations about legitimacy, the drought and Asher’s family that arrive in one long scene of explanation, one of them signalled well in advance.
An ending that stops at the worst moment rather than at a resting place, with the war barely joined.
Adult readers should also know the book carries recalled sexual abuse, torture, captivity and graphic violence alongside its romance.
From Young Readers to Grown Ones
Kemmerer worked in finance before she became a full-time writer, and for most of her career she wrote for teenagers: the contemporary novels Letters to the Lost and More Than We Can Tell, the fantasy Cursebreakers books and the Defy the Night trilogy. Braided Fate, which began with Warrior Princess Assassin in 2025 and will close with a third volume not yet titled, is her first adult series, and the shift shows in the frankness rather than the sensibility. Her interest in decent people trapped by cruel systems is the same one that drove her young adult work. This instalment, from Avon, has been out since 3 November 2026.
Where It Leaves You
Readers who loved Warrior Princess Assassin will find the relationships deepened and the stakes raised, and should forgive the slow middle for the payoff. Anyone wanting a war story with romance on the side may prefer Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros, whose battles never pause for long, while A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas offers a similar mix of sensuality and court danger. For a lighter royal marriage of convenience, The Shadows Between Us by Tricia Levenseller is quicker fun. Captive Traitor King by Brigid Kemmerer ends with its heroes in serious trouble and its love story finally whole, which makes the wait for the conclusion feel very long.