The ultimate choice: die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.
What is your purpose in life?
Holly Gardien, the youngest knight of her country, is content with what has been chosen for her: guarding the heirs of the royal family of Beauvoir is no small task, especially when one of them doesn’t know. Definitely not boring. And it’s an ancestral obligation, holding prestige. Once the prince is crowned, she’ll be set for life, her job passed on to more visible royal guards and Scarlet, the princess, will be gone.
But is Holly happy?
When Scarlet and her brother Jack orchestrate a mix-up in her assignments, she’s shipped off to the heart of the country she’s been avoiding for years and reunited with the crown prince, a skilled empath who sees right through everything she tries to hide. Dragged into the whirlwind of his social circle—six of the ten people who are all connected by a schoolhouse fire and a ritual gone wrong—she uses the opportunity to investigate recent murders in the city while trying to avoid being befriended. Of course, it all goes to hell when her aunt shows up.
Holly must risk her true abilities being revealed in a race against a long-forgotten debt, plunging into the magical underworld of her city and desperately trying to save a princess she betrayed. There are twenty-one lives to be snuffed out and the last will be Scarlet; to save her, Holly must use the abilities she swore off in childhood—it’s a choice between human connection and her own integrity. Between becoming her greatest fear, or languishing in loneliness.
