When Astra Goodwind died, she didn’t enter the peaceful reincarnation queue like every normal spirit. She stole an abandoned food cart, rolled it straight to the gates of the Underworld’s Reaper Bureau, and opened an illegal snack stall on sacred government property. Her signature dish? Deep-fried pickle bites—so sour, crispy, and aggressively aromatic they can wake the recently deceased. Her new life mission? Make Kade Mercer, the Bureau’s coldest and most terrifying Black Reaper, fall stupidly in love with her. Kade has spent centuries maintaining perfect order: Reap soul. File report. Ignore chaos. But Astra Goodwind is chaos—messy-haired, golden-hearted, rule-destroying chaos who blocks his office door nightly, offers him fried pickles like love offerings, and has absolutely no respect for his personal space. When he finally arrests her for unlicensed vending, Astra treats ghost prison like a romantic weekend getaway. But something darker than her cooking oil is bubbling beneath the Underworld. Cursed soul-wallets are raining through every district. Someone is forging memories into weapons. And Astra’s gentle friend Nyx Arden seems strangely connected to a rebellion once powerful enough to crack the Underworld in half. Then a misfired spell, an exploding fryer, and one catastrophic body-swap leave Astra and Kade framed for cosmic treason—and hunted by both the dead and the living. To save the Reaper she loves (and maybe land a reincarnation ticket next to him), Astra will need to rally angry ghosts, outwit a false king, and prove she’s more than a troublemaking fry-cook with a death wish. She might be the one soul the Underworld has been waiting for.