MaliceXxX
Nicolette James never wanted vampires. She wanted her mother to live.
In a world where humans sit at the bottom of an old and merciless supernatural hierarchy, survival has a price, and Nicolette has already paid more than most people could stomach. Her rare blood makes her valuable to vampire society, but value is not the same as safety. To the lords who invite her into candlelit manors and polished ballrooms, she is luxury, status, appetite, and leverage wrapped in human skin.
Then Lord Cyrus Ashbourne notices her.
Beautiful, controlled, aristocratic, and dangerous in ways quieter men rarely are, Cyrus is everything Nicolette has learned to fear: powerful, old-world, possessive, and bound to a society that treats humans as assets before people. He does not pretend to be her savior. He does not offer freedom. What he offers is protection under his name, a place in his household, and the kind of contract that may be a lifeline or merely a prettier cage.
Taken from rural Georgia into the disciplined, glittering cruelty of vampire high society, Nicolette must learn the rules of a world where manners can be threats, generosity can be ownership, and desire is never separate from power. Every room has a hierarchy. Every favor has teeth. Every touch means something.
This is a story of blood, class, hunger, survival, and the dangerous intimacy that grows when a human woman who refuses to break is placed in the hands of a vampire lord who cannot afford to want her too much.
Dark, sensual, elegant, and brutal, this book follows Nicolette as she navigates the line between being protected and being possessed-and discovers that in a house full of monsters, the most terrifying thing may not be cruelty.
It may be care.