In this world, vampires don’t marry. They don’t do rings, or churches, or promises said out loud. If you want someone, if you want them to be yours, you bite them. It’s not violence. It’s affection. When you drink someone’s blood because you love them, it’s sweet. Warm. It settles in your chest like you finally found the missing piece. But if you do it without feeling anything? If you do it out of hunger or spite or boredom? It turns bitter. Like ash and metal. It burns your throat and the whole court can smell it on you for days. That’s why no one does it lightly. Xyion Lyzendaiger and Luviera Ciere were born enemies. It started the moment they opened their eyes. Two heirs. Two houses that have hated each other for centuries. Xy is the Lyzendaiger heir. Tall, sharp, always in black. She talks less than she should and watches more than she lets on. People call her cold and distant. She lets them. She’s never found a reason not to be. She’s never bitten anyone. Not once. Nothing ever felt worth it. Luviera Ciere is the opposite kind of cold. The kind that makes people orbit around her anyway. She’s the Ciere heir. Beautiful in that way that makes people stupid. Long black hair, storm-gray eyes, and a mouth that’s always ready with something cutting. She’s sassy. She’s impossible. She’s the girl everyone in the academy had a crush on at some point, and she knows it. She just doesn’t care. She’s also very, very hard to get. No one’s ever gotten close enough to try. For 200 years they’ve been circling each other. Duels. Insults. Stealing each other’s territory just to prove a point. Xy thinks Luviera is arrogant and untouchable. Luviera thinks Xy is reckless and too loud for her own good. But neither of them has ever taken a mate. And neither of them can explain why, when they’re fighting, their fangs ache. Why their pulse jumps when the other one is bleeding. Why the idea of tasting the other’s blood makes their stomach drop in a way that has nothing to do with hunger. In a world where love is proven with teeth, they’re the only two who haven’t done it. And everyone’s starting to wonder if that’s because they hate each other too much… or because they don’t hate each other at all.