Louise Shellis

Every human body contains resources. Some are simply worth more than others.

When the scarcity of rare minerals turns human biology into measurable value, society builds a hierarchy around what people carry in their blood. A resource scale determines where they can live, what they can access and how much their body is worth.

At the top are the Golden, whose biological value unlocks a life most people can never reach. At the bottom are those worth more as resources than as people.

The system calls it allocation. The people benefiting from it call it necessary.

But when a body can be given a price, someone eventually has to collect.

And the poorest have always been easier to spend.

Which is unfortunate, because examining things too closely is usually how they start.

Horror, thrillers, speculative fiction, dark romance and fantasy. Different genres, same bad habit: take something familiar, question one small detail everyone else seems perfectly happy to accept, and follow it until the entire premise becomes somebody's problem.

Sometimes the monsters aren't monsters. Sometimes the person saving you is worse. Sometimes cheating Death turns out to be a spectacularly bad idea.

Basically, if a story has rules, I'm probably going to interfere with them.

And don't get too attached to anyone...

Everyone wants to cheat Death. Nobody asks what happens if they win.

Styx has spent millennia guiding souls from the living world to the afterlife. He has never killed anyone. He cannot. Death only arrives after the thread of life has already been cut.

Then the cutting stops. People bleed, break, age and suffer, but nobody dies. Souls remain trapped inside bodies that should have released them, and the world begins to discover that immortality without healing is not a miracle.

The only person who may be able to restore the balance is Talia, the last soul Styx ever successfully carried across.

There is just one problem.

She is alive again.

And this time, Death may be the only one who can kill her.

A dark romantic thriller in three parts. One mistake pulls a woman into the orbit of a man who owns everything except the truth, and the cost of knowing it compounds with every book.

Read in order. Nothing here forgives itself.