Malanthia. The Dark Violet - A. K. Hayat

She was fifteen when they took her from the kitchen.

Malanthia Duvenne grows up in a village of violets, warm bread, and small mercies. Then a carriage arrives with a serpent on the door, and the girl who pressed flowers into books is taken north to Stonemouth Keep-where the Greythorn regime trains children to become instruments.

Five years later, she has a new name.

Seraphine, Commander of the Queen's Guard, is everything the Keep intended: precise, disciplined, and deadly. She has been taught to read a room, control a body, bury a past, and turn love into weakness before it can begin.

Then they send her to kill the man she loves.

Ash is everything her training did not prepare her for-direct, open, and good in a way that slips past every wall the regime built inside her. He does not know what she is. He does not know what she has been ordered to do. And when he places a silver ring in her hand, the weapon the regime forged begins to crack.

She has seven days. The prophecy says he must die. The blade is waiting. The red dress is being fitted.

A novel about the architecture of conditioning, the cost of obedience, and the thing that breaks when a weapon learns to love its target.

MALANTHIA: THE DARK VIOLET is a standalone gothic fantasy set in the world of The Binding of Velundra.