In the Civilized World, everyone is rich, yet money doesn’t buy safety. It only buys a gold coffin. The real currency is having the right allies. Low-citizens survive by joining high-citizens’ exclusive inner circles, trading loyalty for protection from laws that govern speech, dress, and posture—and punish mistakes with public beheading.
Low-citizen Loredana Waldsten already knows the cost of breaking the rules. Once a rising fencing prodigy, she lost the right to carry weapons after killing a high-citizen in a brutal locker-room attack. The courts erased his death to preserve his family’s honor. Now she’s unarmed, legally defenseless, and enrolled at the elite Grandmaster University, where champagne spills into the gutters and reputations are built on death duels.
When Loredana’s father, a low-citizen politician, publicly challenges the high-citizens, she becomes a target. Some classmates demand her execution. Others hunt her for sport. And by law, she’s forbidden to fight back.
Her only chance of survival lies with Edmund Prew, a charming yet ruthless high-citizen student she’s been warned against. Edmund's family has been locked in a bitter feud with Loredana’s for years, and he wants nothing to do with her—until a lost bet forces him to protect her within his inner circle. What begins as a scandalous, strategic alliance turns perilous as they fall for each other.
Because the man Loredana killed wasn’t just a high-citizen.
He was Edmund’s cousin.
Loving Edmund means living a lie.
Telling the truth means certain death.
Author's Note: This sweeping, character-driven novel is shaped as much by an intimate, slow-burn romantic arc as by its dystopian setting. Set in a bright, deadly world inspired by the glamour and decadence of the 1920s Jazz Age, the story is written for readers who love flawed, morally complex characters, lethal power struggles, dangerous alliances, forbidden relationships, found family, and a plot that unravels like a mystery.
