Claim the Fallen 1

Two years in a cell for a crime he didn't commit. Ninety seconds of freedom. Then two barrels of buckshot in a parking lot, and Chris Carter's first life was over.

Death offers him a second one: a new world, a clean start, and five skills instead of the standard three. Carter takes the deal and takes the one skill with no description, buried in the list like a trap. Reaper's Claim. Kill something, and whatever made it dangerous becomes his.

He lands with nothing in Oakhaven, a walled guild town where power is bought and sold and the cheapest soldiers are the broken ones. Three women. A build, the deadliest party nobody saw coming, and a runaway guild mage sign on of her own free will, because she's seen what he's building and wants in.

But skills stripped from the dead leave a trail. The guild starts watching—asking who he is, what he can do, and why his people level faster than anything on record. And the farther east the road pulls them, toward the dungeon city of Deephold and the deeper things waiting under it, the more it costs the women who chose to follow an ex-con with a reaper's gift.

He never asked for a second chance.

He's going to make somebody regret giving him one.