A dystopian dark romance where consent isn't given—it's assigned. And Timur Arsanov doesn't share.
When the eastern forces swept through the West in a matter of months, they brought with them something no one had anticipated: an AI system precise enough to sort the conquered by compatibility, efficient enough to assign them accordingly, and indifferent enough to call the result logical.
Talia is twenty-six, newly widowed, and assigned to Timur Arsanov, called Krovavy—the Bloody One—a man who came down from a Caucasus mountain at fifteen with nothing but a willingness to kill and a talent for it. He is given her the way he is given equipment: as something useful, something that belongs to him now.
The world around her is brutal and indifferent: the AI system that catalogues human beings like livestock, the mountain people who call her a witch, the war that takes and takes and occasionally gives something back in a form she doesn't recognize.
Timur is not a man who softens. He is not a man who explains himself, apologizes, or moderates his nature for anyone's comfort. He is violent in the way that mountains are violent—not out of malice, but out of a fundamental indifference to the damage caused by being what he is. He wants obedience, children, and the particular quality of surrender he finds in Talia. He gets all three, and gives almost nothing in return, and the almost is where the story lives.
Talia, for her part, is not a victim. She is a woman of considerable intelligence and almost no illusions, who understands her situation with a clarity that is both her greatest strength and her particular torment.
Reign of Krovavy ends where good first books should end—in the middle of something that has just become irreversible. It is the beginning of a story about survival, identity, and what it costs to love something that was never supposed to be yours.
Trigger Warnings:
- Non-consensual and dubiously consensual sexual situations—the central relationship begins as captivity and assigned ownership; early sexual encounters are dubcon
- Explicit sexual content throughout
- Domestic violence and physical abuse—including slapping and other physical control
- Mentions of graphic violence and death, childbirth trauma
- Animal death (one bull, and one cat—the cat only mentioned)
- War, occupation, and loss of bodily autonomy
- Psychological manipulation and coercive control
