The Vampire Prince

Hazel Field talks to no one, sits in the back row of every lecture, and has a five-year plan to escape her dead-end college town. Then a campus prank on Halloween night leaves her dressed as a bride and abandoned in a graveyard, an offering to the so-called Prince of Darkness. The urban legend promises that nothing will happen. The legend is wrong.

Something ancient answers. A stranger with impossible grace carries her out of the dark, and by the time the church bells finish striking midnight, Hazel is married - bound body and soul to Caspar, vampire prince of Port Cressida, a hidden city of blood rituals and older feuds. He is arrogant, courtly, and haunted by a darkness inside him that once swallowed an entire empire, and the last thing she wants is to feel at home in his arms. The last thing she expects is to feel safe.

Then the secrets start. The court whispers about the ruined temple the palace was built on, about priestesses burned alive centuries ago, about a cursed prince named Tuta who slaughtered his own family and dragged a city down into the earth. The royals close ranks around their sins. And Henrietta, the beautiful royal sister who seems to love everyone, keeps offering Hazel tea, kindness, and advice a little too gently.

Back on campus, Hazel is still expected to hand in essays, dodge her chatty roommate, and let down the nice human boy who finally asked her out - while her sharp-tongued best friend drifts steadily toward her husband's side of the ballroom. Somewhere between the lecture hall and the throne room, the shy girl who faded into the back row starts to realize the bride at the altar was never the sacrifice. She was the choice.

Hazel will need every strange new gift she never asked for - the sight that lets her see the restless dead, a mind-door that opens onto the man she married, and a stubborn courage she thought she had left behind in her dorm room. Because the ghost of a murdered princess is hunting her, the nurse at the hospital is not what she seems, and something has poisoned her blood before it can poison the royal heir she now carries.

When the truth about Henrietta finally bleeds into the open, it costs Hazel her life - and buys her one chance to walk into the realm of the dead and bargain with the empress who ruled the old vampire empire before it fell. What Hazel learns there rewrites every story she has been told: the monster of the ancient legend was framed by a demon, the darkness inside Caspar is waking, and the whole of Port Cressida will burn unless she can reach the man she loves before the darkness does.

The Vampire Prince is a fated-mates vampire romance of secret weddings, royal intrigue, ghostly unfinished business, and a love strong enough to walk out of hell itself - with the heat left behind closed doors and every promise kept in blood.