CROWNED IN ASH : THE DEVIL'S ONLY PULSE
Power didn't taste like wine or gold. It tasted like ash.
For five thousand years, Lucian Vane has ruled the shadows of Sicily as the untouchable Devil Don—a man whispered about like a curse and feared like a god. But beneath the empire, beneath the wealth and bloodshed, he is nothing more than a king in a graveyard.
Cursed by an ancient betrayal, his touch is death itself. Skin to skin, and everything turns to ash. Empires have fallen beneath his hands… but so has every chance at warmth, at life, at something as simple as a heartbeat against his own.
He has everything—except the one thing he cannot have.
Human touch.
Elara Valerius is the opposite of everything he is.
Where his world burns, hers is empty.
A Null.
A void.
A woman untouched by magic—and untouched by feeling.
Raised without emotion, she moves through life with cold detachment, untouched by fear, love, or pain. So when she is offered in place of her sister to settle a deal with the Devil Don, she accepts without hesitation. Not as a sacrifice… but as someone who has nothing left to lose.
She walks into his domain not to survive—
but to finally feel something.
Even if it’s death.
But death doesn’t come.
When Lucian’s lethal hand closes around her throat, the world does not crumble into dust. Instead, something impossible happens—
The curse breaks.
For the first time in five millennia, Lucian feels a heartbeat beneath his palm.
For the first time in her empty existence, Elara feels fire.
What binds them is not salvation.
It is addiction.
Their touch becomes a dangerous hunger—one that drags Lucian closer to obsession and awakens something fragile and dangerowithin Elara. But the truth carved into her very bones threatens to destroy them both.
Because Elara is not just the cure to his curse.
She is the blood of the woman who destroyed him.
And the closer they get, the more the past begins to rise from the grave—bringing betrayal, vengeance, and a fate that was written in blood long before they were ever born.
In a world where touch means death, they are the only exception.
But some curses were never meant to be broken.
And some loves were never meant to survive.
