Arabella Diane Senna has lived her whole life under the knowledge of two things: Necaenas are bad news, and what she does to them is justified. Of course, she doesn't know the reality of things. She doesn't know that she is only fighting because someone above her -- a higher power, someone above all of them -- is manipulating them like pawns on a chess board. She doesn't know that her kind -- the Elite -- are a dying race. She doesn't know that she is one half of what it would take to destroy the corrupt Purest that rule their lives. She doesn't know that she isn't supposed to be alive. She doesn't know that her own mother is hell-bent on killing her. And above all, she doesn't know that the only person who will stand by her in the end is the very person she was born to kill.