Synopsis

The finale to The Culled Crown series.

*****

Monroe Benson is a girl made of lies--a girl made of lies who fell in love with a boy who excelled at telling them. The son of a sailor, he'd said. A nobody.

Liar.
Beautiful liar.

Shouldn't she have tasted those lies on his lips? Shouldn't she have known? And even if she hadn't seen it, hadn't thought to look deeper into his past, shouldn't he have told her? Liar. Liar. Lair. He should have been honest. All those nights they'd laid in bed together and he'd never even been who she'd thought he was. Lies. All of it lies. And what would she have done if he'd mustered the courage to tell her the truth? Would she have run from him? As Monroe finds herself imprisoned once more in Oredison Palace, the answers to those broken questions hardly seem to matter anymore.

The Culling is not over. There are four girls left. Four girls, all of them goddess-chosen and goddess-blessed. And the crown is not finished with them. The whisper of that roiling, dark power in Monroe's blood has not dimmed, even with tacet suffocating it. The game is not over. That toxicant throne was not sated with the blood of a princess. The throne craves a queen. The goddess craves blood. Erydia craves a revolution. And to end it all...to end the Culling and change the world, the liar---the boy with the golden tattoos and the artist's hands---must die.

May the goddess be honored.