During their three months in the safety of the north, Isaac and his family had time to rest and heal from their wounds. Even Gavin Stormbeck, now Gavin Uriah, has been accepted into the family, though he lives under the threat of death if he ever leaves the family’s protection.
But in the south, another threat is brewing. Colleen Stormbeck, Gavin’s mother, has taken control of the region and rules it with the same brutality that her husband did. The team knows their new mission: they must go south and stop Colleen, by any means necessary.
Despite still healing from his own trauma at the hands of his parents, Gavin goes south with the others to help make things right. He knows the danger he faces when he returns to the family he was born into – but could never imagine how far he must go to save the family he chose.
Athena Ryals is the award-winning, Illinois-based author of the Honor Bound series. Their short fiction and poetry have been featured in Erato, Z Publishing's Colorado's Emerging Writers and America's Emerging Poets, and Colorado School of Mines' High Grade.
Honor Bound: Book 1 is the winner of the Wishing Shelf's Red Ribbon Award and is a 5-star Reader's Favorite Awards book. It is also a Finalist for the Next Generation Indie Book Awards.
Honor Bound: Book 2 is the Silver Medalist for the LGBTQIA category of the Reader View's Literary Awards, and is a 5-star Reader's Favorite Awards book.
They are currently working on final book in the series, Honor Bound: Book 6, set to release in winter of 2025. Vera, a prequel/companion to the Honor Bound series, is currently in the works as well.
They graduated from the Colorado School of Mines with a Bachelor's degree in Mining Engineering. While they were there, they took every writing elective available to them. When they were laid off of their engineering job in 2015, they had to start a new career, this time in EMS.
A writing challenge in September of 2019 threw them back into writing and they have not stopped since.