"Scelesta," he whispered. His velvet voice wrapped around me like a dark promise, sending a violent shiver straight down my spine that made my toes curl. "It seems you have been looking in places you shouldn't." He inhaled, a deep, agonizingly slow breath against my neck. "Hmm," he breathed, his lips grazing my skin. "You do smell of honey-ale, Scelesta." My mind spun. His voice was slurred, the edges of his perfectly tailored restraint fraying. His gaze was heavy, hooded, and burning with an undisguised, feral hunger. "Oh," I breathed, the electric tension thick enough to cut with a blade. "You do, too." A low, dark chuckle vibrated in his throat. "It seems we both have our vices tonight." His knuckles brushed agonizingly slow down the side of my neck, mapping the rapid flutter of my pulse, before his long fingers wrapped loosely around the front of my throat. "You have a terrible habit of looking at things that don't belong to you," Nicolas whispered. "The woods are full of monsters. If you keep snooping where you aren't invited, you might just get eaten alive." The threat was absolute-wrapped in silk, alcohol, and the intoxicating heat of his body. "Is that a threat, Your Highness?" I challenged, sliding my throat deeper into the loose, warm cage of his hand. "Or a promise?" His breath hitched. His jaw clenched, his internal war violently playing out in the dark depths of his eyes. "I should lock you in the brig," he rasped, his thumb moving to trace the soft curve of my lower lip. The faint scent of his blood mixed with the wine on his breath. "I should make sure you never wander into the dark again." "Then do it," I dared him. Nicolas let out a ragged exhale, stepping completely into my space, his thigh pressing between mine. There was no air left between us. "You make it very difficult to think clearly, Alba," he confessed. My fingers curled into his half-unbuttoned shirt, gripping the warm, hard muscle beneath. "Then stop thinking," I breathed.

Book 1: OBLIVION: ASHES OF TRUTH Memory is a luxury. Feeling is a crime. Welcome to Novum, a perfect state where every thought is monitored and every soul is sterile. Lea lived by the rules until she found the truth. Now, her predictable future is gone, replaced by the first cracks in the System's glass walls. When your life is a lie, every choice is a revolution. Silence or voice. Oblivion or memory. Lea is about to risk it all for a truth she wasn't meant to find and for the man who woke her heart. In a world built on obedience, she will choose to feel. Even if it burns her to ash.

In the humid, moss-choked darkness of 2003 Louisiana, the St. Roch Syndicate dispatches its most reluctant assets to a derelict summer camp deep in the Atchafalaya Basin. Tess Beauvais, a twenty-three-year-old sorceress drowning in student debt, and Anaïs Chen, a twenty-two-year-old jaded medium, are tasked with a seemingly simple job: retrieve the lost research notes of a vanished Syndicate scientist. Their mission unravels when they cross paths with brothers, Rafe and Frazier. After bailing their father's friends out of jail, twenty-three-year-old Rafe and twenty-year-old Frazier devise a devious plan to get their mercenary patriarch out of the country - only to be ensnared in a nightmare far beyond his depth. The camp is ruled by the Vigneauxs - an unhinged brood obsessed with the grotesque, who breed unnatural beasts in the wetlands, collect bones for unspeakable experiments, and feed trespassers to the horrors lurking beneath the cypress trees. Now Tess, Anais, Rafe and Frazier are marked as the next main course. With their luck running out and monsters closing in, the quartet are forced into a bitter alliance. Each must decide how much of their soul they're willing to trade - whether to outrun the camp's hungry shadows, or become something monstrous themselves. In the end, only the land will remember what is sacrificed to survive a season of sour earth.