Part of Legacy of the Nine Realms
First published 2023
Aria has stopped running from the chaos and started making it. Across the Nine Realms, kingdoms are crumbling, and her hands are not clean. Once there may have been a version of her built to save people. That version is harder to find now. King Knox keeps pushing her toward the edge, and the trouble is she stops wanting to step back. He is brutal in everything he does, and she matches him. Between them the air catches fire. The central tension is not whether they will destroy each other. It is whether destroying each other is the same thing as wanting each other. Aria has been broken by the Realms, reshaped by loss and war, and what came out the other side does not look like a savior. It looks like a monster wearing a crown. She could still choose differently. She probably will not. This is an enemies-to-lovers story built on wreckage, where two people who should be opponents keep colliding until the whole world around them smolders. The emotional core is simple and brutal: what happens to a person when the thing they were made to fight starts to feel like the thing they were made for.
Genres: romance, fantasy, adult, adult-fiction, dark-fantasy, fantasy-romance
Vibes: dark, destructive, emotionally-complex, gritty, intense, passionate
Tropes: anti-hero, enemies-to-lovers, found-family, slow-burn
Setting: Nine Realms
560 pages · Kindle Edition · Amelia Hutchins
Content warnings: death, violence, war