We Who Will Die

**By Stacia Stark**

**Estimated Reading Time:** 45 minutes

**What This Story Explores:** The cost of survival when every choice carries blood on its hands, the way love and grief become tangled in impossible circumstances, and what remains of a person when their agency is stripped away piece by piece.

**Who This Book Is For:** Readers who want their romantasy dark, their heroines forged in poverty and loss, and their love stories built on years of shared history, betrayal, and the slow, painful work of choosing each other anyway.

The Thorn is the poorest district in Senthara, a place where the air itself seems to carry the weight of everything its residents have lost. It is here that Arvelle Dacien has spent six years scraping together a life from the ruins of the one she was supposed to have. She works as a bodyguard, taking whatever jobs she can find, earning just enough to buy the lung tonics that keep her fourteen-year-old brother Evren breathing. His lungs were scarred in a mine explosion, the same explosion that reshaped their family into something smaller and harder. Every coin Arvelle earns disappears into apothecary vials. Every day is a calculation of how much air her brother can draw and how much she can afford to buy him. Then the tonics run out. Every apothecary in the Thorn is dry, and Evren's breathing grows worse by the hour. That is when Bran appears at her door, a vampire with two vials of medicine and a proposition that will unravel everything Arvelle has built. He wants her to enter the emperor's gladiatorial trials, survive them, and then kill Emperor Vallius Corvus. In exchange, he will send Evren to healers in the north, healers who can repair his lungs permanently. Arvelle refuses. She has spent six years keeping her head down, surviving, protecting what remains of her family. She will not become an assassin. But the next day, Evren collapses. His lips turn blue. His chest heaves for air that will not come. Bran shatters one of the two vials on the ground, letting the precious medicine soak into the dirt, and holds up the last one. The choice is no choice at all. Arvelle agrees, and Bran bites her neck, sealing a vampire bond that compels obedience and prevents her from revealing the plot to anyone. Her twin brothers are handed over to Bran's associate as collateral. And Arvelle leaves the Thorn behind, carrying the weight of what she has agreed to do. What follows is a story about survival in a world designed to crush the powerless. The emperor's ludus, where gladians train and fight for the entertainment of vampires and the wealthy, is…