Blood-price. A father’s greed. A family’s ruin.

When the gods send gold in payment for a killing, it should end the feud. Instead, it opens a wound that will not close.

Regin, the youngest son and a gifted smith, watches his household fracture when Hreidmar claims the treasure for himself and Fafnir’s rage begins to harden into something darker. In the hours after the ransom arrives, silence becomes a weapon, pride becomes law, and the hoard begins to change the people who stand nearest to it.

Regin can feel that change even before he understands it; he sees enough to know that some treasures do not merely belong to a family. They consume it.

What happens to a man when the gold he was denied becomes the thing he can no longer escape?