Broken by Daylight

**By Elizabeth Helen**

**Estimated Reading Time: 45 minutes**

**What This Story Explores:** The cost of inherited bargains, the weight of secrets kept in the name of love, and the terrible choices made when family and fate collide.

**Who This Book Is For:** Readers who love sprawling fantasy romance with high emotional stakes, cursed princes, ancient magic, and heroines whose power grows from grief as much as love.

*Broken by Daylight* opens on a dig near the Nile in 1904, where a young archaeologist named George O'Connell meets a woman who will define the rest of his life. Anya reads hieroglyphs no one else can decipher, laughs like a donkey's bray, and carries a rose-shaped necklace that catches the Egyptian sun in every color at once. She tells George he cannot own history, then rides off into the dunes on a camel, leaving him with the unshakable certainty that his life has just begun. Together they piece together a broken slab that reads "Here lies the Queen." Neither understands, yet, how literally those words will haunt them both across centuries. That prologue is a doorway. The novel then sweeps forward into a world of cursed princes, underwater prisons, gladiator arenas, and ancient bargains that bind mothers and daughters across generations. This is the fourth book in Elizabeth Helen's *Beasts of the Briar* series, a fantasy romance built around Rosalina, a woman whose connection to the magical Vale and its four cursed princes has grown deeper and more dangerous with every installment. By this point in the saga, Rosalina is no longer a newcomer discovering magic. She is a force in her own right, bound to Castletree, loved by multiple princes, and hunted by an enemy who has spent decades engineering her destruction. The novel's tone is lush and emotionally charged. Elizabeth Helen writes romance the way other authors write battle scenes: with intensity, physicality, and a deep investment in every glance and touch. But the book is not soft. It opens with Rosalina imprisoned in an underwater cell, interrogated daily about a missing necklace and a stolen token. It moves through gladiator combat, harpy attacks, and a city drowned to save its people. The sweetness of the romance is always shadowed by the cost of the magic that makes it possible. The central question of *Broken by Daylight* is not whether love can conquer all. It is whether love can survive the truths that have been hidden in its name. Every major character in this novel carries a secret. Caspian has known for decades that Rosalina's mother is alive and imprisoned. Dayton has buried the truth that he was always meant to be High Prince. Wrenley, the shy acolyte, is not…