Fruit of the Flesh

New York's Gilded Age glitters brightest just before the blood hits the floor.

When former ballerina Petronille De Villier needs an escape from her family's suffocating darkness, and struggling sculptor Arkady Kamenev needs the De Villier name to crack open society's most exclusive doors, a marriage of convenience seems like the perfect transaction. Cold. Calculated. Temporary. Neither of them expects to recognize something in the other — something hungry, something dangerous, something that has absolutely no business existing in a polite drawing room.

But recognition has a way of complicating arrangements.

As Manhattan's elite toast their union with champagne and carefully concealed contempt, bodies begin to disappear and old secrets claw their way to the surface. Petronille and Arkady circle each other like predators sharing a cage — bound by their contract, suspicious of their similarities, and increasingly unable to pretend that what pulses between them is simple hatred. Their partnership, built on mutual distrust and self-preservation, fractures and reforms into something far more volatile. Far more honest.

*Fruit of the Flesh* is a darkly atmospheric Gilded Age romance that wraps its horror in silk and candlelight, asking how well you can truly know someone whose shadows mirror your own. With gorgeous, oppressive period detail and a romance that earns every dangerous beat, this is a book for readers who want their love stories to have teeth.

Some hungers cannot be politely ignored.