THE FALLEN SAINT

Seraphine has hunted monsters for the Order for ten years. She walks off the battlefield and into her own engagement banquet — and into a verdict. Her fiancé, Archbishop Viktor, declares her tainted by monsters, voids the engagement before the whole hall, and has the holy armor stripped from her back. Paraded through the streets as a fallen saint, she is thrown into a dungeon — where the vampire prince Valen offers her a blood-red crystal: her mother's last drop of heartblood. The truth cracks open in her palm. She is not a hunter. She is the last daughter of the Blood King, the clan the Order slaughtered twenty years ago. She does not run. She walks to her own pyre — and the holy fire burns away the three holy nails that sealed her, waking the blood beneath. She rises from the flames: "The one you wanted to burn is the last daughter of the Blood King. Your Holiness — I'll take this game." Behind it all waits the Pope, who has fed a dead heart with her family's blood for twenty years, waiting for her to kneel and hand over her own. On the night of the blood moon, she opens her palm — and her father's heart beats again. They call her the Fallen Saint. She never fell. She simply, at last, stood up.