Firebird is the first book in Juliette Cross's trilogy The Fire That Binds, published by Bramble (Macmillan) in April 2025 and an instant New York Times bestseller. The author bills it as "an epic, scorching dark romantasy," set in a reimagined ancient Rome where the empire is ruled by dragon shifters and flying deathriders conquer from the skies.
Julianus Dakkia is a Roman general and nephew to the emperor, a conqueror of legendary brutality who was enthralled years earlier by a Dacian dancer named Malina — a girl he once, as a centurion, gave a secret talisman. When she stands before him again as a captive on a scarred battlefield with her life in danger, he shifts into his dragon form to save her, an act that may mean his head on the imperial gate. Twenty-one-year-old Malina has survived the loss of her family and is determined to fight to her dying breath, yet she cannot deny that her soul has always answered his. As she learns that Julian is caught in his mad uncle's machinations for domination, she helps him plot the downfall of the empire itself.
Reviewers place it squarely in adult dark romantasy: a captive-and-conqueror romance with a fated bond, wrapped around an inner circle scheming to overthrow the emperor and a heroine who carries the power of prophecy. The book handles slavery in its reimagined Rome directly, and reception has been divided over the master-and-captive dynamic at the centre of the romance — readers drawn to obsessive, possessive dragon-shifter romance have found it compulsive, while others have found the premise uncomfortable. It runs to roughly 400 pages.