Chapter 1

My husband, the Vampire King, drained me of my blood every night for three years to keep my stepsister beautiful.

Tonight, he handed me divorce papers and told me I should be grateful he let me live this long.

I signed them with fingers so anemic they couldn't grip the pen without shaking.

He didn't know my blood was the only thing keeping his kingdom from collapsing — and I was down to my last pint.

Lena Voss. That is the name I wrote on the death certificate they called a divorce agreement.

The pen slipped. A drop of my blood — thin, pale, barely red anymore — fell onto the paper. It sank into the parchment and glowed for a half-second before disappearing.

Caspian didn't notice. He never noticed anything about me.

"Faster, Lena," he said. He stood by the window of his penthouse office, sixty floors above the city. The lights of the skyline reflected in his black eyes. He didn't look at me. He looked at his phone. "Vivienne's coronation is in two hours. I need you gone before the cameras arrive."

Vivienne. My stepsister. The woman who would replace me as Queen of the Valdric Vampire Court.

"I have a question," I said. My voice sounded like paper tearing. "About the settlement."

"There is no settlement," Caspian said. He typed something on his phone. "You brought nothing into this marriage. You leave with nothing."

That was a lie.

I brought my blood.

In the vampire world, human blood is currency. But my blood — the blood of a Solaris bloodline, the last living descendant of the Sun Priests — was not just currency. It was a weapon. One drop could heal a dying vampire. A vial could power a ward that protected an entire city.

Caspian's kingdom had been shielded for three years by wards painted in my blood. His soldiers drank diluted vials of it before battle and became unstoppable. His court thrived because every month, I was strapped to a medical chair in the basement and drained until I passed out.

But the blood was credited to Vivienne.

She told Caspian she was the Solaris heir. She wore the sun-shaped birthmark — tattooed onto her hip by a black-market body artist in Prague. She sat in the Donor Throne during ceremonies while I lay in the basement, needles in my arms, watching my life pour into plastic bags.

"Sign the last page," Caspian ordered.

I flipped to it. My vision blurred. The words swam.

*The Donor hereby relinquishes all claims to blood-debt, marital protection, and sanctuary within the Valdric Court.*

Blood-debt. That was the vampire law that said if someone gave blood to save a vampire's life, that vampire owed them an eternal debt. Caspian owed me thousands of debts. Every soldier I had healed. Every ward I had powered.

This paper erased all of it.

"If I sign this," I whispered, "I have no protection. Any vampire can hunt me."

"Then stay indoors," Caspian said. He finally looked at me. His eyes swept over my body — the bruised arms, the sunken cheeks, the medical port still implanted in my neck.

He saw it all. He felt nothing.

"You were a useful vessel, Lena," he said. "But Vivienne is the real Solaris. She always was. You were just... storage."

Storage.

Three years of marriage. Three years of bleeding. Three years of watching him kiss my stepsister at galas while I recovered in a locked room.

And I was storage.

I signed the paper.

Caspian took it without touching my fingers. He walked to the door.

"A car will take you to the border," he said. "Don't come back."

He paused. For one moment, his hand tightened on the doorframe. His nostrils flared.

"Why do you always smell like that?" he muttered, almost to himself. "Like sunlight. It's... distracting."

Then he left.

He didn't know that the smell of sunlight was the Solaris bond — the sacred scent a vampire could only detect from their true Fated Mate.

He had been smelling me for three years and blaming it on the air freshener.

I pressed my hand against the medical port in my neck. It pulsed with a dull, infected ache. They had taken blood this morning. Two liters. For Vivienne's "coronation glow."

I had maybe three liters left in my body. A human needs at least four to survive.

I stood up. The room tilted. I grabbed the desk.

On Caspian's screen, a live feed showed the ballroom downstairs. Vivienne stood on a stage in a golden dress, waving at a crowd of vampires. She was radiant. She was glowing — literally glowing with stolen Solaris light.

My light.

I turned away from the screen and walked toward the service elevator.

Tonight, Vivienne would become Queen.

And tonight, the wards protecting the kingdom would begin to die — because the real Solaris was leaving, and she was almost out of blood.