Awakened. The Hidden Flame, #1

Layla Ashraf has always been good at two things: translating dead languages and pretending she doesn't feel the fire. For three weeks, she's been ignoring the heat beneath her ribs-that low, persistent burn she's blamed on stress, on caffeine, on the thesis that refuses to write itself. She's a PhD student in Cairo, not a character in one of the ancient manuscripts she studies. She deals in facts.
In footnotes. In things that can be proven.  Then a stranger on the metro looks at her like she's a problem he already knows the answer to-and by nightfall, everything she thought she knew about history, about magic, about herself, has been stripped down to ash.  Beneath Cairo's streets exists a world called Al-Asfal. A hidden city of Guardians sworn to protect the surface world from creatures of shadow.
Every Guardian is bonded to a dragon. And Layla, it turns out, has been bonded to one since the moment she was born: a dragon carrying the rarest element in existence, one that's been extinct for five hundred years.  Everyone in Al-Asfal wants to control her power. Some want to weaponize it. A few want to destroy it before it destroys them. And then there's Ziad-her cold, infuriating, devastatingly competent trainer-who looks at her like she's the most dangerous thing he's ever been assigned to protect.
 The fire has been waiting five hundred years to wake up. So has she.