Marina has spent her entire life fighting to keep her family alive. Crushed by poverty, she watches helplessly as illness consumes her mother and brother while her father and sister struggle to survive.
With no wealth and no mercy left to beg for, Marina makes a choice born of desperation rather than desire.
She offers herself as a royal consort.
In simpler terms, a mistress to the king.
It is not love she seeks, but leverage she can trade for medicine, protection and a future for those she loves. Her body and freedom became the currency.
King Xanthanius rules that court with ruthless precision. Murdered through betrayal and resurrected by a fatal mistake, he exists in a fractured state.
Immortal, yet incomplete.
Half of his life force was stolen during his death, leaving his resurrection flawed and his existence unstable.
Consumed by the need to reclaim what was taken, Xanthanius cared little for loyalty or blood so long as it brings him closer to restoring his full immortality.
When Marina enters his court, Xanthanius sees her as little more than a tool, useful for navigating alliances and performing tasks beneath a king’s notice. But Marina is far more dangerous than she appears.
Unknown to them both at first, she is bound to the missing half of Xanthanius’s immortality, connected to the very power he needs to survive.
What begins as mutual exploitation slowly warps into something far more intricate. Desire tangles with ambition, distrust softens into intimacy, and manipulation gives way to impossible choices.
Loving Marina may cost Xanthanius the immortality he is willing to kill for, while Marina must decide whether saving her family is worth destroying the man she never meant to love.
or herself.
