Because I Killed Him

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.

Loredana Waldsten already knows what breaking the rules costs. 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 honour. Now she is unarmed, legally defenceless, and enrolled at the elite Grandmaster University, where champagne spills into the gutters and reputations are built on death duels.

When her father, a low-citizen politician, publicly challenges the high-citizens, Loredana becomes a target. Some classmates demand her execution. Others hunt her for sport. And by law, she is forbidden to fight back. Her only chance of survival is Edmund Prew, a powerful and ruthless high-citizen student she has been warned against, whose family has been locked in a bitter feud with hers for years — and who wants nothing to do with her until a lost bet forces him to take her into his inner circle.

What begins as a scandalous, strategic alliance turns dangerous as they fall for each other. Because the man Loredana killed was more than an average high-citizen, and if Edmund ever learns the truth, the only person keeping her alive may become the one most determined to kill her.

The first book in The Nine Gentlemen, a planned five-book series. Long, slow-burning and closed-door: the tension is political and social rather than explicit.