The Wicked in Me

**Author:** Suzanne Wright

**Estimated Reading Time:** 45 minutes

**What This Story Explores:** A woman who has already died once and carries something ancient and terrible inside her. A city of exiled immortals who have spent a thousand years waiting for a weapon to fall into their hands. The dangerous line between being protected and being owned, and what happens when the monster inside you is the only thing keeping you alive.

**Who This Book Is For:** Readers who love dark paranormal romance where the heroine is genuinely dangerous, the hero is genuinely terrifying, and the world is built on old grudges, older gods, and the kind of desire that feels like a threat.

Wynter Dellavale has been dead before. She was ten years old when a group of boys tortured and killed her, and whatever came back from that death was not quite the same girl. Something else returned with her, a creature placed inside her by a deity who does not explain herself. That creature has kept Wynter alive through things that should have killed her again. It has also made her dangerous in ways her coven cannot tolerate. The novel opens with the end of Wynter's old life. Her coven, the Moonstar witches, has decided she is too much of a liability. They want to be chosen by the Aeons, the ruling immortals who live in an underground utopia and occasionally select worthy mortals to join them. Wynter's dark, death-touched magick makes the coven look bad. So they do what frightened people do: they cut her loose. But banishment from the coven is not a release. It is an execution disguised as mercy. What follows is a story about survival, vengeance, and the strange family that forms among people who have all been discarded. Wynter finds her way to Devil's Cradle, a city founded by seven immortals called the Ancients, who were themselves banished from Aeon a thousand years ago. The Ancients have been waiting for a way to strike back at their enemies. Wynter, with her curse and her monster and her inconvenient habit of not staying dead, might be exactly what they need. The tone of this novel is dark, sensual, and unapologetically violent. Suzanne Wright writes paranormal romance the way some people write thunderstorms: heavy with atmosphere, crackling with tension, and liable to leave you a little breathless. The central relationship between Wynter and Cain, the most feared of the Ancients, is built on mutual recognition of danger. Neither of them is safe. Neither of them wants to be. The central question the story explores is simple and brutal: what do you do when the thing that makes you monstrous is the only thing that…