Betrayed by My Father

In Oceania, the shining realm of the gods, Zeus hands down a sentence no son expects: his youngest, Abel, will walk into hell alone and bring back the head of Hermes, heir of Hades. The gods protest. His mother stays silent. And when Abel steps through the portal, he does not know the cruelest part — his father has already stripped his power and turned him human. The mission was never a trial. It was an execution dressed up as glory, and the king of kings calls it a blessing.

The same divine cruelty reaches further than one son. To punish the sun god Apollo, Zeus casts Apollo's infant child down to earth, his heart taken from him, doomed to remember nothing of heaven and to crave blood forever. The child grows up beautiful, cursed and utterly alone. Centuries later he is Elvis, the Vampire King of Ocean City — feared, worshipped, and hollow — until the night his trusted right hand, Victor, buries the dagger of the sun in his chest and leaves him dying on the forest floor.

That is where Monica finds him. She is a human college student in Ocean City, a girl who eats lunch alone and fills her diary with rules for surviving loneliness, because the parents who should have loved her are gone and everyone else always leaves. She should run from the beautiful stranger bleeding at her feet. Instead her scent drags him back from the edge of extinction, and her blood does what the old prophecy said only a fated mate's could: it saves the king from death. Monica never asked to be prophecy's answer. Now the king has carried her off to his hidden kingdom, and there is no walking out of it.

A mortal queen is an insult his court will not forgive. Clara has been trained since birth by her mother Stella to wear the crown, and the elder Lawrence, Stella's secret lover, schemes at their side; when flattery fails, Clara decides the mortal simply has to die. Victor sits on the stolen throne and drums up a war to bury his treason. And far from the palace, darkness closes on another daughter of the city: Doris, fierce and unbreakable, is hunted by the werewolf alpha Ignativs, a lord who was told he had no mate and means to break her the way his father broke his mother. The witch the desperate turn to for help, Jessica, is worse than every monster they fled — she trades in cages, beasts and blood. Even Dante, Doris's father, a man the cartels once learned to fear, arrives too late to stop her, and what he finds in that cabin shatters what is left of his family.

Between a king who begs to love her and enemies who want her crowned or buried, Monica must decide what she is willing to become. Desire this dangerous always collects a debt, and it is collected in the dark. The coronation is coming, and every schemer in the kingdom means to be standing beside the throne when the crown comes down. A rose sits on the table. And someone is knocking at the door.