Welcome to “First Chapters,” Cosmo’s column where we shine a spotlight on debut authors who you are definitely going to be obsessed with. And what better way for you to get to know them and their books than with the first chapter of their new release. This round, we’re highlighting Taylor J. LaRue’s Steelborn, a new romantasy debut that features magic, an immortal warrior, and a thief with a code that she may have to break in order to finally free herself from her past. Here’s some more info from Requited:
Introducing an epic, slow burn enemies-to-lovers romantasy novel about a heroine forged in steel and rage, and the cursed immortal who might turn out to be as much her salvation as she is his, perfect for fans of Danielle L. Jensen and Callie Hart.
This DELUXE LIMITED EDITION is available while supplies last and features:
- Gilded silver edges
-Illustrated endpapers
- A foil-stamped case cover
- Special effects on the jacket
Never run. Never bow. Never die.
Reya Connery became the Crimson Dagger, the most notorious thief in Rhiterra, by following a strict set of rules. One: There is no honor among thieves. Two: A good blade is key to any negotiation. Three: Only the dead keep secrets. And Reya has a secret that must be kept at all costs. But when a heist goes wrong on the eve of paying off her debt to a ruthless crime lord, Reya may need a new set of rules. And lots of coin. Fast.
Enter Caelan Halcyon, an immortal warrior whose magic makes him a valuable target—if the curse inching closer to his heart doesn’t kill him first. There’s just one person who might be desperate enough to try and get their hands on the fabled cure in time to save his life, someone whose legend claims they can steal anything: the Crimson Dagger. A male of honor, Caelan loathes everything the beautiful, cocky thief represents, yet knows that Reya is his last hope for survival.
Their search takes them to the edge of the known world, where Reya discovers that there is far more at stake than her and Caelan’s own lives. Now, Reya must confront deadly foes, her growing attraction to the immortal who is as lethal as his jawline is perfect, and the rage she’s spent a lifetime trying to bury. This time, her daggers aren’t going to cut it, and the fate of all magic-born hangs in the balance.
Enter a world ruled by tyrants and thieves, where magic is outlawed, revolution brews, desire is dangerous, and an impossible cure may prove deadlier than the curse.
Tropes:
- Slow-burn romance
- Enemies-to-lovers
- Deadly curses
- Tortured immortal hero
- Secret identity
- Forced proximity
- Found family
-Only one saddle
Ready to meet the one and only Crimson Dagger? Well, you can take your first look at Reya who is featured in the stunning deluxe limited edition that you're going to want to show off on your shelf! Check it out below!
"Reya has been a voice in my head for more than seventeen years, and watching her come to life at long last has been a profoundly moving experience. It was such a gift to be involved in the design process, and I'm elated to finally be revealing the cover," Taylor told Cosmopolitan. "The designer and artists who crafted this special edition of Steelborn with such passion and care have created something truly exceptional—I'm still pinching myself that my name gets to go on it—and I'm counting down the days until I get to walk into a bookstore and see it sparkling on the shelf."
And, of course, we promised you the first chapter of the book which you can read below! Trust us: you're going be absolutely obsessed!
"The opening chapter of Steelborn will forever be one of my favorite chapters in the book. The story started in various places over the years, but this moment is where Reya came into glorious color for me as a writer; it's such a fun sneak peek of what to expect," Taylor continued. "I hope you’ll check out Steelborn and escape into the starlit world of Rhiterra, and that you’ll fall for Reya and Caelan as hard as I have."
Don't forget to pre-order Steelborn so you can read it as soon as it comes out on August 4, 2026!
Chapter One: The Thief
Reya Connery braced herself flat against the underside of the bridge, nothing beneath her but air.
Any minute now, she thought, fingers and soles digging into the floor beams. Sweat shone like a crown across her brow. Her eyes tracked a glistening bead as it plummeted to the cobblestones three stories below.
It was hardly the first time she’d risked her neck for a purse full of coin, but if she did her job correctly—and she always did—it would be the last. A strand of copper hair she could never quite bring to heel escaped from the elaborate braid tucked inside her hood, and she muttered a quiet curse when it fluttered into her line of vision.
“Careful, Red, or you’ll give yourself away,” Gavin goaded her, arms quivering as he strained to keep straight-backed between the stringers.
She would have given him a vulgar gesture were their limbs not all that held them perched above the streets of Edris.
“Where the rotting hell are they?” Zaim groaned on her other side. “I’m raining sweat.”
Reya pinched her eyes shut, breathing through her nose. It had been a long day, and she’d just cleaned her armor. However, if the two imbeciles beside her didn’t stop whining, she was prepared to clean it again, despite how difficult it would be to scrub their bloodstains from the leather.
She just had to get through tonight. Then she would be free.
Before she could tell them both to hold their tongues lest she remove them, a cacophony of bouncing chainmail and clattering hooves triggered a hyperawareness she felt everywhere. A caravan surrounded by armored and mounted Silver Guardsmen rounded the corner south of where they were hiding.
Finally.
The impressive convoy was exactly as her employer had described. Three carriages conjoined at the base, one in front of the other. Six sentries on horseback. Two more stationed on a platform at the rear. One armed driver.
Not enough to stop them.
Her words were little more than a puff of air: “On my mark.”
They had no ropes or grappling hooks. To land directly atop the caravan, they had to time their fall perfectly.
This would work. After all, it was her plan.
“Now.”
Against the starlit backdrop of the Rhiterran Empire’s famed capital city, three thieves dropped from the sky.
Reya plunged into the night, midnight-blue cloak whipping behind her like a banner of war. Her stomach rose with the sudden weightlessness, but years of training kept her dinner down. The caravan crossing under the overpass reached up to greet her. Reya bent her knees as her boots hit the hood of the second carriage with a thud she felt in every limb, already palming two daggers from the arsenal of steel strapped across her hips and thighs.
Zaim landed onto the bench next to the driver, stole the reins, and shoved the poor man off before he even realized what was happening.
“Ambush!” one of the sentries shouted.
“On your left,” Reya said, and threw. Gavin crouched just in time to miss the blade that shot over his shoulder. She sent another flying, and another, aiming for the joints in the sentries’ armor: where the shoulder met the arm, the hip met the leg, and the jaw met the neck.
Two riders broke off from the convoy, while another lifted a signal flare.
Reya moved, dagger poised to sever the tendons in his wrist, but an arrow tore through his trachea first, saving her the trouble. Four more blue-cloaked figures appeared, sprinting across the rooftops alongside the caravan and unloading their quivers on the sentries.
A bolt whistled past her ear. With a hiss, she twisted with the kind of speed she’d earned through pain, glaring at the Silver Guardsman who had missed her cheek by a hair’s breadth. He moved to reload, but not quickly enough. Her dagger found its mark in the man’s eye, and he fell from his saddle with a choked scream, his white stallion cantering on without him.
Reya kissed the air in the horse’s direction, sending a silent wish on the wind that it would find its way out of the city and into the ancient wilds of the north.
Zaim whistled sharply in warning from the driver’s bench before snapping the reins. Their spotters fell back, and Reya and Gavin braced themselves as the caravan jolted forward with renewed speed, the sleeping city a blur of color and light as they flew past. She felt every rattle of the wheels over the cracked stones.
To the Silver Guard, Reya and her cohorts were known simply as “those rotting assholes.” But the criminal world knew them as the Bluehoods. They were far and above Rhiterra’s most dangerous outfit, helmed by Lennox Raulin, the empire’s ruling crime lord. Reya preferred to work alone, as she so often did these days, but Lennox had insisted this job was too big for one person.
Do this, kiddo, and you and I will be square, Lennox had told her.
Come sunrise, for the first time in a decade, her days would be hers to decide.
“Eyes up,” Reya said with a nod to the rear, one hand on her steel as the two sentries on the platform—all that remained of the guard—began climbing toward them.
The Rhiterran imperial crest gleamed on their breastplates: an airborne eagle clutching a serpent in its talons, wings splayed around an eight-pointed star. The scene was meant to symbolize the empire rooting out the world’s corruption. The hypocrisy of it nearly made her roll her eyes. The snakes were not slithering through the world King Rothmire was set to conquer; they were right here in his capital, getting rich.
Reya would know—she was one of them.
Gavin was already darting for his chosen target. Of course, he’d taken the smaller of the two men.
“Rotting coward,” Reya muttered, drawing her fighting knives and adjusting her stance as the caravan went over another divot on the road.
In the cold light of the two waxing moons, her opponent’s eyes raked along the feminine curves beneath her armor. She could practically read his thoughts as he sized her up, smirking when he marked the delicate features on display above the navy strip of fabric obscuring the lower half of her face: the high, freckled cheekbones and emerald eyes rimmed with the deepest sapphire. Despite how her body angled toward him in violent challenge, he did not deem her a threat. That error of judgement would be his last.
“You know,” Reya said, “every man I’ve ever fought has looked at me with that same expression. And they’ve all fallen just the same.”
She waited for him to make the first move. The second he did, she knew he and his partner were not run-of-the-mill Silver Guardsmen. These soldiers had been chosen to dispatch the worst kind of threats. Size was his advantage, so speed would have to be hers. She began a dance she could have performed in her sleep, sidestepping his swings again and again even as the carriage rattled beneath her boots. Reya swept out her leg, hoping to bring him to his knees, but he anticipated her. She was up again in an instant. Time slowed as he made to cut her in half, and she flew into a backbend, watching the soldier’s blade soar over her face. Reya had to give him credit: He was lasting longer than most Silver Guardsmen who’d tried to kill her.
His overconfidence turned to frustration, and she grinned beneath her mask. The hem of her cloak whipped in a gust, moonslight flashing on the ruby-encrusted dagger that never left her side. The man’s jaw slackened as he realized who he was fighting.
She loved this part, when at last they saw her for the menace she was. His controlled movements turned increasingly erratic with his rage as he lunged again into the place she’d been standing. Reya feinted left and took the opening to drive her dagger up into his helmet. But he caught her wrist and headbutted her—hard.
With a stream of curses so colorful she was certain her ancestors were looking down from the stars in shame, she put distance between them, dodging his thrusts by the sound of the blade cutting the air. She curled and uncurled her toes, clenched and unclenched her fists, until the world slipped back into focus. Reya could count on one hand the number of times that had happened to her in the last five years.
Cool air touched her lips, and she realized her mask had slipped; the fabric hung like a scarf around her neck. The soldier, smug with imagined victory, studied her face in enough light to describe it to a sketch artist. She didn’t bother fixing the mask. He would be dead in a minute.
Reya stowed her fighting knives and tugged her father’s sword from its sheath across her back; she could still feel the impression of his hand on the worn, leather-wrapped hilt.
Using the sword was like looking her father’s ghost in the eye. It hurt every time. But she savored the pain.
They collided, steel clashing and glinting in the moonslight as the caravan tore through the streets. Reya dared take her eyes off him long enough to note the building they’d just passed. He was a gifted fighter, but there was only one person in this All-Gods-damned city who could best her. When they rounded a sharp corner, she was ready for it, crouching down to grip the side of the carriage’s roof. She’d made the Bluehoods walk the route over and over again until they knew every turn, curve, and bump—when to brace, when to lean, and when to hold on.
He dropped to one knee to keep from going over the side on the turn, and she didn’t hesitate. His final words, whatever they were, broke off into a gurgle as she drove her sword through the gap between his helmet and shoulder. Tightening her grip, Reya pressed a leather boot against his chest and kicked. When the blade came free, she jerked away from the blood spray, clamping her mouth and eyes shut and rocking back on her heels as his body tumbled off the roof.
Reya smeared the splatter from her face with an elbow. Then she caught her reflection in the sword. The thief staring back at her rippled around the words inscribed down the fuller in the runic script of the First Language: Never run. Never bow. Never die. Sacred, ancient words. Her father’s words. Reya swallowed hard. How many times had she soaked them in blood?
Every thief had an endgame. When Reya pictured hers, she often found herself standing inside a forge thick with ash and heat, a cast iron sign of her own making above the door. A place to create rather than take. To forge. A different life; the life her parents had always wanted for her. With her debt to Lennox paid in full, she could finally leave this city. Sail to a distant shore and put the blue cloak to the flames. Master an actual trade.
Her father’s trade.
Gavin faced her, one foot resting casually on the back of his opponent—either dead or unconscious—on the hood of the next carriage.
“I thought you were going down for a second there, Red,” he said and shoved the body off the roof.
Beneath his hood and mask, Reya knew his head of dark curls was knotted tightly at the nape of his neck. Gavin was broad-shouldered and lean-muscled with warm brown skin, a stubbled jaw, and a crooked smile that made even steel-hearted women swoon. Reya knew exactly what that stubble felt like scraping against her thighs. She could almost still feel him beneath her, hands bruising her hips as she moved atop him, encouraging her to take what she needed. Running a job was practically their idea of foreplay. The devious gleam in his multicolored eyes—a rare fusion of palest green, blue, and descending hazel—told her he was afflicted by the same memories.
Every time, she swore it would be the last, until the next time when it wasn’t. Reya didn’t do relationships. This thing between them, whatever the hell it was, needed to end—and it would.
Tomorrow.
Reya wiped the blade on her pants before sheathing it, the merciless wind drying the spatter on her cheeks. “You always leave me the burly ones.”
“We all have to earn our coin,” Gavin said, a grin in his voice. “Not that you need it. You’re richer than all of us, and yet for some reason you still live in that closet of a flat in the West End.”
Reya huffed. “Best view in the city.”
Gavin leapt over to her carriage, invading her space. “I think you just like having an excuse to sleep at my place.”
Arrogant bastard. She loved it. “Since when do we sleep at your place?”
He hummed a laugh, reaching up to smear a drop of blood on her cheek. “I would have taken the big guy, but I hate to rob you of your fun. Or has the famous Crimson Dagger gone soft?”
The overlarge ruby set in the pommel of her dagger sparkled in the moonslight, as if preening under the attention. Reya had more than earned the cold sweat that name elicited in even the most dangerous circles of Rhiterra’s criminal underbelly.
“You wouldn’t know fun if it grabbed you by your worthless balls.”
He winked a green-blue eye. “Happy to prove you wrong on both counts anytime. Tonight, if you’re lucky.”
Reya shoved him a little too hard, but he just laughed, at ease in the lightness between them that had grown far too comfortable.
“If you two are finished!” Zaim shouted over his shoulder.
Reya turned to assess their position as she reaffixed her mask. With the guards gone, Zaim had turned the caravan off the Sovereign Road, and now they were hurtling toward the South End warehouse district, or as the locals liked to call it, the Heap.
Edris was the beating heart of an empire, a capital roaring with life and enterprise. A fitting stronghold for a king—murderous warmonger though he was.
And Reya was heir to its underworld.
Lennox had been explicit in his instructions: He wanted the entire caravan. And he’d been particularly cagey about what was inside.
Part of her was afraid to find out. Lately, every job made less sense than the last, even for someone like Lennox, whose hands were in too many pockets to count. The more illicit his business dealings in Rhiterra became, the more people in positions of power who got involved, the more Reya added to her roll of sins the All-Gods were sure to read off at the gates to eternity. She couldn’t deny she was glad to be leaving Lennox’s employ.
There were precious few pieces left of her soul, and she intended to keep them.
One last job.
“If anyone tries to follow us,” Reya said, nodding to the bow and quiver peeking over Gavin’s shoulder as she freed the hatchet from her belt, “shoot them down.”
The caravan passed its first marker—a stone monument to some ancient royal Reya couldn’t name—as Zaim wove the maze she’d charted to lose any tails. They had exactly ten minutes until they reached the drop-off point. Reya maneuvered down one side of the first carriage, using the handles and footholds the engineers had conveniently placed there for the footmen, while Gavin took up position at the rear to cover them.
Each carriage door was chained and padlocked. Her job now was to remove the locks before they reached the drop-off point so the Bluehoods could quickly empty the cargo and torch the evidence.
The job was as good as finished. Already mentally packing her trunks, Reya hurled her blade down on the shackle. Even she, for all her skill, couldn’t pick a lock at the speed the carriage was moving. It only took three swings until the metal sparked and snapped. Grabbing the broken bar and chain, she creaked open the small door and tucked them inside, unwilling to leave so much as a breadcrumb for the Silver Guard to follow; the dead sentries would be the last anyone ever found of this caravan. A hollow thump and clatter echoed back to her. Opening the door a little wider, Reya peered into the darkness, expecting to see box crates, chests, barrels, antique furniture, something, anything.
But it was empty.
That’s not possible. Denial warred with reality as her mind raced for an explanation. Could the caravan have been a decoy? Gavin had assured Lennox that he’d confirmed the transport time and day with three separate informants. It had taken Reya weeks to coordinate this job. Weeks to spy on the Silver Guard and pay off the right people, learn their route, and plan the assault.
This was precisely why she liked to work alone.
Grinding her teeth, Reya stowed her hatchet, adjusted her grip, and jumped to the next carriage, refusing to accept that this all had been for nothing. She caught the handle and pulled herself up with a grunt, wedging her toes into the footholds.
They passed their second marker—a tavern with a crescent moon sign half-hanging off its hinges. Seven minutes. The adrenaline lighting her veins on fire was better than a shot of whiskey. She did her best work to the symphony of a ticking clock and her own racing heart.
Reya turned the next lock over in her hand and examined its odd, intricate design. It wasn’t a model she’d seen before. Even the chains around this carriage were thicker.
This must be it. But then why have three carriages?
That’s when she felt the strange otherness emanating from the metal and recoiled. Praying she was mistaken, she angled the iron padlock toward the moonslight; it set the keyhole’s inner green lining shimmering, and she swore.
The lock was fashioned with Kellstone—the only natural substance in the world immune to magic. Which meant whatever traveled inside this carriage was either so valuable that the Silver Guard had wanted protections against even magical tampering…or it was magic. And magic had been outlawed in Rhiterra for centuries.
If it had been any other job, she would have leapt off the moving caravan and gone home, riches be damned. She wanted nothing to do with whatever was inside. And yet her future depended on it. Reya counted to five, willing someone to stop her. But no one would or could. Freeing her hatchet, Reya threw it down once, twice, three times. Sparks flew, but the iron held.
Again.
Nothing.
Again. Again. Again.
“Rotting hell, break!”
The metal snapped. Reya tried to catch the padlock, but it clattered across the street behind them as the caravan sailed on. She would have to go back for it later. Groaning, Reya loosened the chains, hands trembling over the threshold.
Opening the carriage would be reckless now that she knew magic was involved. The safest plan was to toss the chains down to the street and move on to the next carriage. She could come back to recover them with the lock. But her feet wouldn’t move. She wasted precious seconds debating a choice she’d already made. She needed to know what they were dealing with.
Reya felt for the comforting weight of her ruby dagger, praying whatever was inside wouldn’t be the death of her.
With a tug of the iron handle, the door flew open in the wind. Waste and mold and rot and the faint scent of petrichor filled her lungs. Eyes watering, Reya covered her mouth and nose. She took one glance at the contents and swore against her palm.
All-Gods above.
They were all screwed.
Excerpted from Steelborn by Taylor J. LaRue. Copyright © 2026. Reprinted with permission of Requited. All rights reserved.
Steelborn, by Taylor J. LaRue will be released on August 4, 2026 from Requited. To preorder the book, click on the retailer of your choice:
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