The Virtue and the Vixen, Volume 1 by Sarah M. Cradit

A doomed rescue. An irrevocable bond. A darkness centuries in the waiting.
Plunge into this haunting, tangled odyssey of a disgraced noble, a black widow, and the devastating secrets and chilling magic binding them.

Elloven Hawthorne flees for her life after murdering her noble husband and four of his friends. Never mind the reasons; no one will care. No one ever has.

When a mob seizes her carriage, Jesstin Skylark intervenes. She’s grateful—if confused—because he looks like he’d rather be anywhere else.

Then he shocks her with an invitation: an evening in the infamous village of vice, where he runs a tavern catering to illicit desires. She shouldn’t accept, but she does. What begins as a scandalous escape ends with Jesstin condemned to hang for a crime he didn’t commit.

Elloven exploits a legal loophole in a desperate bid to save him. There’s just one catch.

She must bind herself to him. For life.
The bond can’t be undone by magic—at least not magic from their world.
Convinced the answer lies in her ancestral lands, which have whispered to her for years, they set out for a place she’s never seen with a man who now wishes they’d never met.

But Jesstin has a secret. Two years ago, he murdered Elloven’s brother. And he carries a dark magic of his own: necromancy, though he doesn’t yet know the name for it.
None of this is coincidence. Every piece is part of a sinister design centuries in the making.
And the shadowed mountain necromancers have been patiently awaiting their arrival for a very, very long time…

The Virtue and the Vixen Volume 1 is a gothic, dark, romantic fantasy set in the Kingdom of the White Sea Universe, featuring a character first introduced in The Altruist and the Assassin, as well as one readers are meeting for the first time. It is the third and penultimate story in the Guardians Cycle of The Book of All Things.

The Book of All Things is a series of fantasy romance tales set in the vibrant, epic world first introduced by USA Today Bestselling Author Sarah M. Cradit in the Kingdom of the White Sea trilogy.