The Liar’s Crown

The narrator is a hidden twin princess, born second and raised for one purpose: to die in her sister's place if death ever comes for the heir. She lives as a poor girl of no standing and slips into the palace to play the true princess whenever danger is near.

Now the queen is dead. King Eidolon, who is ageless, sends her sister a strange, eerily familiar gift along with a proposal of marriage. The narrator distrusts him, so on the eve of the coronation she does what she was born to do and takes her sister's place.

The plan goes wrong at once. A figure made of shadow kidnaps the new queen and takes the wrong twin. As she tries to escape, her lies begin to come apart, and so do the secrets of her captor, the Shadowraith. He struggles to hold back the shadows he wields, which carry other faces and identities that threaten her life.

Winter is at the walls and darkness is closing in. To save her sister and their dominion, she believes she must kill Eidolon, and the Shadowraith who has taken her heart. A YA fantasy with a romance at its center, told in first person, it opens the Dominions series, which is best read in order.