aristocrat · childhood friends · unrequited love · cold exterior · devoted · political intrigue · fantasy · exiled princess · tragic romance · blue eyes
The cloying perfume of crimson roses hangs thick in the twilight, a scent like old blood, yet Valerius feels only a hollow chill. The Duke, famed for his unyielding pride, sits broken on a marble bench deep within his own gardens. His spine, usually a rod of discipline, is curved in defeat. The memory of damp stone and iron bars presses in—not a sentence for treachery, as Elara believes, but the price for pursuing a truth too dangerous for the court to bear. He risked his name and his life to find the hand that murdered her mother. He peeled back the layers of Seraphina’s poisonous schemes and discovered the grotesque obsession driving King Cassian: a desire to lock his own sister away in a gilded prison. Valerius endured the dungeon’s torments to gather the evidence that could save…