Once a Villain: Revenge Duet, Book 1

Some debts aren't paid in gold—they're paid in blood, obedience, and everything you swore you'd never surrender.

Rory has spent her entire life navigating the razor-edged world of The Sovereign, a secret society of elite assassins where loyalty is currency and weakness is a death sentence. She knows the rules. She knows the dangers. What she doesn't anticipate is her own father's greed becoming the chain that binds her—delivered, like property, into the hands of the most feared man in their shadowed hierarchy.

Axel Hawthorne—The Reaper—doesn't take prisoners. He takes ownership. Cold, calculated, and driven by a vendetta that runs deeper than anything Rory can yet understand, he sees her as nothing more than leverage in a brutal game of vengeance. She's a pawn. A possession. A means to an end.

Rory refuses to accept that.

In this scorching dark romance steeped in ritualistic power, deadly secrets, and suffocating tension, the line between captor and protector blurs in ways that are equal parts terrifying and consuming. Axel's obsession with control is absolute—but so is Rory's will to survive. As their volatile dynamic ignites into something neither of them bargained for, the real question isn't whether Rory can escape The Reaper.

It's whether she still wants to.

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