Black Heart's Desire

Amy has everything a young woman of privilege is supposed to want: money, education, a respected family and a future waiting to be claimed.

What she does not have is the one thing she wants most.

To be chosen.

Then she meets Ashtarte—beautiful, fearless and scandalously at ease with the kind of desire Amy has only watched from behind books. Their unlikely friendship becomes an exchange. Ashtarte teaches Amy to stop hiding from attention, while Amy opens the doors of respectable society to a woman who has spent her life looking in from the outside.

Each begins to envy what the other has.

Then Marcus arrives.

Charming, privileged and dangerously easy to believe, he draws both women toward futures they have secretly wanted. By the night of Amy's twentieth-birthday masquerade, desire, friendship and ambition have become impossible to separate.

And one public betrayal changes everything.

Alone and furious, Amy wishes for something painfully simple: one lover who will choose her above everyone else.

Someone has been listening.

He waits beyond the threshold in a red mask, beautiful, ancient and cold as winter. He offers Amy exactly what she asked for.

All she has to do is invite him in.

At midnight, the masks come off.