Keeper Of Empire Graves

The most feared conqueror on the continent keeps his army of the dead in perfect order - and a private ledger counting how much of himself is left.
Leonora Vane died of a fever at seventeen. Eleven years later she wakes breathing in a sealed crypt beneath the Inquisition's cathedral, her father in his grave, her world rewritten without her-and a thread in her chest pulling steadily toward the one man the Inquisition has sworn to destroy.
Raven Croft is the Keeper of Empire Graves, Lord of the Ashfields, Commander of the Undying. Six kingdoms have fallen to his black banners, and every soldier who dies against him rises by morning in his ranks. Yet the villages he conquers find fair scales, honest tax collectors and grain carts that arrive on time. Every night he writes down a number: the percentage of himself he has spent on the dead. He has been counting for eleven years. He has a fairly good idea how it ends.
The Inquisition has a plan for that ending. Leonora is the anchor of a ritual built to kill him-and Chief Investigator Holden wants her inside Croft's capital under a false name, close enough and long enough for it to work. But Leonora's father spent his last four years hunting something his superiors insisted could not exist: a third option between a controlled death and an uncontrolled one that would take sixty thousand raised dead down with the man who holds them. Finishing his proof means walking straight into the enemy's council hall.
She will not walk in alone. Sela, a former provincial tax assessor from a territory Croft swallowed, runs his empire with merciless precision. General Aldrik Voss surrendered a city and now watches its markets reopen with a soldier's stubborn distrust. And Marett, a ritual specialist sent to carry out the rupture, has orders in one hand and a conscience she cannot file away.
Against them stands a pale, orderly city whitewashed every twelve years, and the men who profit from there being only two answers. Holden has thirty years of certainty, a doctrine that treats the dead as a second death waiting to be administered, and a consortium whose gold funded the war and has not stopped counting its losses. Some questions, he believes, are too dangerous to answer.
This is not a story about a monster. It is about a tired man, a dead girl who woke up, and the long, patient work of building a way to let the dead rest and the living stay-one ledger entry, one promise, one name at a time.
If you love: slow-burn enemies-to-allies romance, morally gray necromancers, political intrigue and empire-building, and found family forged in the shadow of war - this is your next read.