Taken by Touch and Torment

**Author:** Maggie Sunseri

**Estimated Reading Time:** 18 minutes

**What This Story Explores:** The brutal machinery of captivity and the quiet, ferocious work of survival. It is about identity, desire, and the long, bloody road back to love after the world has tried to carve you into something smaller.

**Who This Book Is For:** Readers who want dark romantic fantasy that does not flinch, who can stomach cruelty when it is in service of a story about resilience, and who believe that love can be both a wound and a lifeline.

The novel opens in the dark. Scarlett wakes on cold stone with a thick collar locked around her throat, and she does not know where she is. She knows only that she has been taken. The palace around her is marble and shadow, a monument to fanaticism and blood. The man who owns it, Durian, is the leader of Valentin's born vampires, a zealot who has built a court around worship, punishment, and the slow destruction of anyone unlucky enough to fall into his hands. Scarlett has been stolen from Rune, the turned vampire lord of Aristelle, but she is no ordinary captive. Beneath her human-seeming skin, she is a succubus, a half-vampire sex demon descended from the Dark Goddess Lillian. Durian does not know this. He believes he has taken a prized human pet from his enemy. That ignorance is the only weapon Scarlett has. The novel is a dark fantasy romance, but it is also a study in captivity and resistance. Maggie Sunseri writes with an unflinching eye for the mechanics of abuse: the way a torturer alternates pain with counterfeit tenderness, the way a victim's body can betray her mind, the way hope becomes both a lifeline and a liability. The atmosphere is oppressive and sensual, full of marble halls and silk sheets and blood. Scarlett's voice carries the story, and it is a voice full of fear, fury, and a stubborn refusal to die. The central question is not whether Scarlett will escape, though that question burns through every page. The deeper question is what escape will cost her, and whether she can reclaim herself after being systematically unmade. The novel asks what it means to love someone when you are not sure if your own desires can be trusted, and whether a person can be broken so thoroughly that no amount of love can put her back together. It is a story about power: who has it, how it is taken, and how it can be seized back with nothing but a whisper and a lie. The book has resonated with readers because it does not soften its horrors. It earns its happy ending by…