Book 1.5 - The Culled Crown Series. A Culled Crown Novella. Ten girls. Nine bodies. One crown. If given the chance to be queen, would you take it? Viera Kevlar is goddess-touched, one of ten female heirs to the Erydian throne. She is a poisoner, the first girl in the history of the Culling to ever be blessed with such an ability. Despite her own reservations and desires, she will have to fight for the crown. She may have to die for it. If she wins the Culling by killing the other nine candidates, then she will be crowned queen of Erydia. Her family will be invited to live in the palace and her mother might have access to healers who could save her life. But to be queen, she may have to lose the one thing she cares most about-- herself. This is a novella that acts as a prequel to Monroe Benson's story--"The Culled Crown." I would suggest reading that novel before reading this one. Although this story takes place before Monroe's Culling, this novella should be read between book one and book two.

The finale to The Culled Crown series. ***** Monroe Benson is a girl made of lies--a girl made of lies who fell in love with a boy who excelled at telling them. The son of a sailor, he'd said. A nobody. Liar. Beautiful liar. Shouldn't she have tasted those lies on his lips? Shouldn't she have known? And even if she hadn't seen it, hadn't thought to look deeper into his past, shouldn't he have told her? Liar. Liar. Lair. He should have been honest. All those nights they'd laid in bed together and he'd never even been who she'd thought he was. Lies. All of it lies. And what would she have done if he'd mustered the courage to tell her the truth? Would she have run from him? As Monroe finds herself imprisoned once more in Oredison Palace, the answers to those broken questions hardly seem to matter anymore. The Culling is not over. There are four girls left. Four girls, all of them goddess-chosen and goddess-blessed. And the crown is not finished with them. The whisper of that roiling, dark power in Monroe's blood has not dimmed, even with tacet suffocating it. The game is not over. That toxicant throne was not sated with the blood of a princess. The throne craves a queen. The goddess craves blood. Erydia craves a revolution. And to end it all...to end the Culling and change the world, the liar---the boy with the golden tattoos and the artist's hands---must die. May the goddess be honored.

In this gripping sequel to The Culled Crown, Monroe finds herself fighting between the power in her blood, her traitorous heart, and her freedom. ***** Monroe Benson had two choices: be queen or be dead. When the Culling for the Erydian crown turned deadly in new ways and girls started dying outside of trials, Monroe's rebel brother gave her a third option: kill the queen and escape the Culling. Hidden in the mountains of Vayelle, Monroe must now try to prove her loyalty to a group of rebels who only see her as a threat. They don't want culled crowns or toxicant thrones - they want a new country with no goddess and no goddess-touched girls. With her only allies now her enemies, Monroe finds herself on a dark path filled with grave danger. [[word count: 250,000-300,000 words]] Cover designed by Natasha Shaikh