(Detailed) plot overview: Eighteen-year-old Verity has lived a sheltered life under the watchful eye of her overprotective sister Camille, never venturing beyond Camille's estate. However, she starts to think about leaving when she receives an invitation from the Duchess of Bloem to paint a portrait of her son, Alexander Laurent. Despite her eagerness, Camille forbids the journey, revealing that Verity has the unique, albeit unknowing, ability to see ghosts. Yet, the allure of adventure and the mysteries of Bloem prove too compelling, and Verity escapes to the Duchess's vibrant estate, Chauntilale.
At Bloem, Verity is captivated by the estate's beauty and by Alexander, the kind-hearted son of the Duchess, whose life has been marred by an accident that left him paralyzed and isolated. However, Verity's new surroundings soon give way to disturbing nightmares and visions, including a strange woman and three monstrous infants. Her probing leads her to believe that the woman is the Duke's mistress. More baffling is her sighting of Alexander walking, an impossibility given his condition.
The truth unravels when Verity discovers that Alexander was one of triplets, his brothers Julien and Viktor possessing unique abilities and hidden away due to the Duke's fears. Julien's mind-reading and Viktor's fire control mark them as extraordinary, yet potentially dangerous. Verity agrees to keep their existence secret for a day, a decision that leads her, Julien, and Viktor to uncover horrifying truths in the Duke's study: intercepted letters, a record of chilling experiments on women, and a grotesque collection of preserved infants, the remnants of the Duke's twisted quest to engineer a deity-like being. The revelation that Alexander is the 'golden child' of these experiments, harboring an undisclosed power, adds another layer of intrigue.
The plot thickens when Verity and the Duchess share a drink at the Duke's tavern, leading to a drunken confession from the Duchess about her complicity in the Duke's experiments and her subsequent efforts to sabotage them. The following day, the Duchess is found dead, poisoned, setting the stage for a confrontation with the Duke. The Duke's confession about his sedative-laced wine, meant to incapacitate women for his experiments, and the revelation that Alexander's paralysis was the result of his brothers' violent actions, not an accident, add to the shocking revelations. The reason behind the Duke’s attempts to create a godlike being in fact were linked with his childhood; as a young child, he saw his young sister who was born without hands be murdered by his overly religious father, who believed his baby sister to be satanic. From then on the Duke developed a resentment of the gods, believing them to be useless, and that he could engineer something much better than the gods who let his sister die.
In a turn of events, Julien, influenced by Viktor's aggressive thoughts, murders the Duke. A subsequent altercation between the brothers ends with Viktor killing Julien and then attempting to kill Alexander. In the midst of this chaos, Alexander's grandmother, previously antagonistic towards Verity, reveals her involvement in the Duke's experiments and her preference for Viktor over Alexander.
A confrontation involving Alexander, Verity, and his grandmother follows, culminating in the discovery of a bloodied body. Camille's timely arrival adds to the tension, and Verity is knocked unconscious before she can ascertain the identity of the deceased (since Viktor and Alexander are identical and the body is bloodied enough that it's further hard to tell who it is). She awakens in a room at Chauntilale, the Duchess of Bloem's estate, with Camille revealing that the body was Viktor's, not Alexander's.
The story concludes with Alexander and Verity, though gravely injured, alive, and their wedding.
My opinion: I stayed up until 3am to finish this, (it was worth it), and the plot overview does not do the twists justice to what they felt like experiencing while actively reading. I was not expecting a lot of the twists at all. And to be honest I thought Alexander would be a villain because once Verity saw what looked like Alexander walking around, I could alternatively see the author setting the stage for Alexander not being as nice as he comes off and that he was tricking her for some unknown reason. (My initial theory being because she could see ghosts, she was special for some reason and Alexander might have wanted to sacrifice her-?) I didn't really know. I just did not trust Alexander one bit. I only believed that he was genuinely a nice guy when Verity had her first solid, definitely real, interaction with Alexander's two other triplets and saw with her own eyes the concrete evidence of Alexander being a triplet. (But I still had a bit of a suspicion. It only fully went away when I was, what, 20 pages away from finishing the book-.) All in all though, I'm pretty new to the gothic fantasy genre but so far it seems really enjoyable!- (Especially the ghosts. I loved the ghosts. If gothic fantasy has a lot of ghosts then I'll probably be reading more of it-.)
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