From a critically acclaimed, UK bestselling author comes a noir romantic fantasy set in a world in which sin is a fatal disease, and the rich hire the poor to carry out their basest instincts—until the forbidden romance between a sinner and a mysterious figure threatens to destroy everything.
In the gritty, glittering city of Valestadt, every crime—from the smallest infraction to the largest atrocity—leaves its mark in the form of Bloodrot, a wasting disease that slowly eats away at its host. For the poor, sinning is a death sentence. For the rich, it’s just another expensive pastime. After all, anyone can be bought.
Talin Keller is a sinner. She has learned to rely on nothing and no one—traits that have served her well as right-hand woman to the holiest man in the city, the Prophet. Talin’s job is to get her hands dirty so the Prophet’s can stay clean. It’s a job she’s frighteningly good at, and judging by her rapidly advancing Bloodrot, it might also be her last. But when a routine assignment puts Talin on a collision course with the Prophet’s most hated enemy, a shadowy underworld figure known as “the Warden,” she begins to see a future for herself that doesn’t involve a body bag. If she can get close enough to the Warden, she can trade his capture for her own freedom.
The closer Talin gets to the Warden, though, the more she finds herself falling for his sharp edges and twisted sense of justice. And as the lines between good and evil—between saint and sinner, between lover and enemy—begin to blur, Talin finds herself at the center of a conflict that could destroy everything.
