"They took your crown, little queen. Let me give you his kingdom's ashes instead."
Lady Evelina Ashcroft was intended to be queen. Engaged to Crown Prince Adrian since childhood, groomed for the throne, beloved by the people—until the night of her wedding when she discovered her own sister in her fiancé's bed. 

But the betrayal didn't end there. Her sister Isolde claimed Evelina had been doing unlawful god-magic, and the entire court believed it. Her title was stripped. Her engagement transferred to Isolde. Her family disowned her openly, calling her a blight on their house. In one night, she lost everything—her crown, her love, her name, her future. 

Cast out with nothing but the clothes on her back and a death sentence hanging over her head, Evelina flees into the one place no one would dare follow: the Forbidden Ruins of Ashenfell, where the Betrayer God Kyroth was sealed after he tried to burn the royal line to the ground three centuries ago. 

She doesn't expect to survive the night. She doesn't want to. 

But when her blood touches the ancient seal—spilled as she considers taking her own life—she unwittingly awakens him. Kyroth, the God of Vengeance and Broken Oaths, imprisoned for adoring a mortal queen who was executed by her own people. He's devastatingly attractive, wickedly beguiling, and devoured by three centuries of rage. 

Their relationship forms instantaneously, violently—a blood bargain that ties her life to his freedom. He can't leave the wreckage without her. She can't die without pulling him back into incarceration. They're adversaries by birth, comrades by necessity, and something far more terrifying by fate. 
"You want revenge?" he asks, his fingers tipping her chin up to meet eyes like dying stars. "I'll train you to burn the world. But know this, little queen—gods don't love. We consume. And I've been starved for three hundred years." 

As Isolde prepares to marry Adrian and take Evelina's throne, Kyroth teaches Evelina in the forbidden magic that once nearly destroyed countries. But the more time they spend together, the more the ruins expose their common, unthinkable truth: Kyroth's mortal queen didn't die. She was Evelina's ancestor, and the bloodline he tried to rescue has finally returned to him. 

The gods want him dead. The crown wants her executed. Her sister wants her erased from history. And the tie between them is waking a power that could either save the kingdom or destroy it to ash.
Revenge was supposed to be simple. Love makes it deadly.

The bond burns through me like liquid fire.


I stumble backward, staring at the mortal girl sprawled against the broken seal. At the mark glowing over her heart—a broken crown wrapped in thorns that matches the shattered chain now burning on my own chest.


Three hundred years. Three hundred years of darkness and silence and rage, and the first thing I do upon freedom is bind myself to a dying mortal?


She blinks up at me with tear-filled eyes. "I didn't—I don't understand—"


"Your blood." I force the words out through clenched teeth. "It wasn't just any blood. You have—"


I stop myself before I can finish. Before I can tell her what I feel pulsing through the bond. What's impossible. What can't be real.


No. Not her exactly. Fragments. Echoes. But enough to make the ancient magic in my prison recognize her. Enough to create a bond that should never exist.


Chapter 9 - The Betrayer God