{"product_id":"wicked-heir","title":"Wicked Heir","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eThe FBI handler who flipped her was already on the Halberd payroll. The mafia heir she was sent to expose has known her real name since the morning before she stepped onto his campus. He has not, yet, decided to tell her.\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eFrom the umbrella pen name behind a 10-book romance launch, Sloane Ashford. Spice: 5 chilies. Extensive content warnings at the front of the book. Please read them. Always HEA.\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eVesper Reyes has spent four weeks memorizing the campus map of Halberd University and the faces of the three founding-family heirs the FBI has identified as the current generation of the Sons of Halberd. She has agreed to do this in exchange for her younger brother's reduced sentence on a heroin charge the Halberd syndicate set him up for. The FBI offered her the trade. She took it.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe morning she steps off the train at the Halberd village station with a single suitcase, the snow on the chapel steps has already been cleared. The clearing was done by a man in a dark-charcoal overcoat who has been on the bench at the end of the platform for forty-five minutes. He watches her pull her suitcase across the platform. He does not, for thirty more seconds, move.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThen he picks up the suitcase, sets it next to him on the bench, and says, quietly, in a voice the Halberd faculty has not heard him use in three years: \u003cem\u003e\"Ms. Reyes. Walk with me.\"\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eDominic Halberd is twenty-five years old, the eldest Horseman of the Sons of Halberd, the secret society his great-great-grandfather chartered in 1771 the same week the school did. He has, in the four weeks since the FBI approved Vesper's enrollment, read her file twice, her brother's file three times, and her handler's file every single morning. He has known, from page one, that the woman the FBI sent to put him in federal prison is a 22-year-old English Lit junior with a brother she would burn the world for.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eHe has also known, since the second week of her file, that the FBI handler who flipped her belongs, on Tuesdays and Fridays, to the Halberd payroll.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eHe has not told her any of this. He is going to. He has chosen the date.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eVesper thinks she is the hunter. She has, in the inside lining of her coat, a recording device the size of a coat button. By the end of week two she has used it exactly once: the morning Dominic stands in the doorway of the rare-book reading room she has decided is her hiding place, takes the coat off her shoulders, hangs it on the hook by the door, and says, \u003cem\u003e\"I'm going to need that button back at some point, baby. I'll give you a week.\"\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eShe is not, by week three, sure who has been hunting whom.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe Sons of Halberd have a ritual on the spring equinox. Vesper's brother's reduced-sentence paperwork is contingent on evidence the FBI does not yet have. And Dominic Halberd, who has spent the entire semester quietly removing every threat to her that the syndicate's enemies and his own family have positioned around her, is in no particular hurry to tell her, \u003cem\u003eyet\u003c\/em\u003e, that he has been waiting his entire adult life for one specific person who needed him specifically. \u003cem\u003eTouch her and die\u003c\/em\u003e is a phrase his great-great-grandfather would have recognized.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eWicked Heir\u003c\/strong\u003e is a dark college mafia romance for readers of Rina Kent's \u003cem\u003eGod of Malice\u003c\/em\u003e, Penelope Douglas's \u003cem\u003ePunk 57\u003c\/em\u003e, and H.D. Carlton's \u003cem\u003eHaunting Adeline\u003c\/em\u003e. Book 1 of the Sons of Halberd trilogy: three couples, three Horsemen, one secret society. Standalone HEA per book. Spice: 5 chilies (open door, dark themes, on-page dub-con). \u003cstrong\u003eExtensive CWs at the front. Please read them.\u003c\/strong\u003e This one is not for everyone.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eTropes worth committing a federal crime for: dark college mafia, morally grey heir-to-the-empire, FBI-informant heroine in the wolf's mouth, \"I know baby, I know\" reverent cruelty.\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ePick your room. xx Sloane.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Sloane Ashford","offers":[{"title":"Volume 1 (Wicked Heir)","offer_id":44645343330387,"sku":null,"price":29.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"Volume 1 + 2 (Wicked Heir + Wicked Son)","offer_id":44645343363155,"sku":null,"price":54.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"Complete Trilogy (Vol 1-3: Wicked Heir + Wicked Son + Wicked Oath)","offer_id":44645343395923,"sku":null,"price":74.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0705\/4986\/4531\/files\/design1_emotional_hook.png?v=1779416000","url":"https:\/\/silkthorn.com\/products\/wicked-heir","provider":"Silkthorn","version":"1.0","type":"link"}