For more than eight centuries, Deacon Matthews has moved through the shadows of the Far East, France, Spain, London, and Manhattan, untouched by remorse, leaving blood and ruin in his wake. Cursed with a hunger that has stripped him of love, mercy, and hope, he has long believed nothing could change the monster he has become.

Then he meets the one woman who does not simply fear him. Amanda Wright is intelligent, determined, and unwilling to surrender herself to his darkness, even as their connection pulls them into a dangerous struggle neither of them expected.

As Amanda resists him, Deacon is forced to confront something far more terrifying than desire: the return of feeling. What begins as captivity becomes a battle of wills that binds them both, awakening in him a fierce devotion that could either redeem him or destroy them together.

Now the curse that made him a vampire is no longer his only prison. If Amanda can reach the soul he thought was lost forever, Deacon may have one final chance at freedom. If she cannot, they may both be consumed by the darkness closing around them.

Long before Deacon Mathews became a creature of shadow and hunger, he was the beloved son of a powerful sultan, raised in a palace of marble courtyards, perfumed gardens, and whispered prophecy. Revered for his beauty and trained for command, he was destined to inherit not only power but the weight of a dynasty. Yet on the eve of that destiny, a darkness entered his father's court, and Deacon was cursed with immortality that stripped him of warmth, mercy, and the life he had once imagined.

Across the centuries, he carried only one fragment of that lost world with him: the memory of a woman named Amna, whose soul had once seemed bound to his before either of them understood why.

What he does not know, as the modern world draws them together again, is that Amna is more than a memory reborn, she is the living key to the prophecy that may either free him from his curse or destroy them both.