To Kill a Kingdom
Princess Lira is siren royalty and the most lethal of her kind—known among sailors as the Prince's Bane, she takes the heart of a prince every year on her birthday and has collected seventeen. But when she kills one of her own kind to protect a human, her mother, the merciless Sea Queen, punishes her by stripping away her siren form and trapping her in the body of the thing she hates most: a human girl. To return to the sea, Lira must deliver the heart of Prince Elian before the winter solstice.
Elian is heir to the most powerful kingdom on the water, but he'd rather hunt sirens than sit a throne. When he pulls a mysterious, sharp-tongued girl from the ocean, he has no idea he's rescued his greatest enemy—or that she's hunting the very heart in his chest. As the two are forced together on a dangerous voyage across the Hundred Kingdoms, the line between predator and ally begins to blur.
A dark, swashbuckling reimagining of Hans Christian Andersen's "The Little Mermaid," To Kill a Kingdom pairs a murderous heroine with a pirate prince for a high-seas adventure built on rivalry, reluctant trust, and slow-burning attraction. Alexandra Christo's debut is a standalone-feeling fantasy set in the wider world of the Hundred Kingdoms.
The Princess's Bane, a deadly siren princess cursed into human form and forced to hunt the heart she needs to reclaim her true self.
Heir to the powerful kingdom of Midas who would rather captain a ship and hunt sirens than rule.
Lira's cruel mother, ruler of the sirens, who curses her daughter and demands Elian's heart.
