
Once the favored imperial daughter of Ashwood, Riley Farley wakes in chains when the kingdom falls and her family lies butchered. The man who sits on the throne—Sebastian Dorian—claims her as a prized concubine and keeps her close with cold hands and colder jokes. But Riley hides a secret: she trained on a remote mountain in the art of the Heartless Way, and she will trade a single true devotion for a blade that can cut kings’ souls. To avenge a murdered dynasty she will feign forgetting, bait Sebastian’s fierce, reluctant devotion, and make him feel the ruin he dealt to her—until fate, love, and ritual twist together. Which will break first: her oath of revenge, or the strange, aching love she awakens in her enemy? Who will die for love, and who will die because of it?

35 Chapters