In the exhilarating second romantasy novel in Rebecca Robinson’s Dark Inheritance Trilogy, a fiery couple forced apart must navigate a deadly maze of politics and power to reunite across a continent at war.
Intrigued? Read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from The Wicked and the Damned by Rebecca Robinson, which releases on February 24th 2026.
Torn from her husband Reid’s arms and dragged back to her homeland in chains, Vaasa is no longer a ruler, but a political pawn. Now under the control of Ozik—a cunning Zetyr witch with a stranglehold on her magic—she faces annulment, forced betrothal, and a kingdom that no longer feels like her own. As Ozik’s machinations aim to install himself as the true power behind the Asteryan throne, Vaasa is forced to take part in his game.
Meanwhile, across the continent, Reid is done playing politics. But waging war is never simple, and a soldier’s fury cannot stand up against Icruria’s bureaucracy. With allies fading and time slipping away, Reid may have no choice but to infiltrate Asterya on his own to find the woman he loves and bring her home.
As Vaasa’s magic begins to flare, she desperately seeks control, even if Ozik is the only one who can offer it. She then finds a cryptic final message from her mother about a precious missing necklace that might just be the answer to finally freeing her magic from Ozik. Yet when a ghost from Vaasa’s past reemerges among the suitors vying for her hand, escape might be within reach—but will it demand a betrayal that real love may not survive?
CHAPTER 1
He’d come for her in the middle of the night.
Footsteps sounded down the hallway of the eerily quiet prison where Vaasa could not hear even the waves. It had been like that for weeks—a veil of midnight draping every inch of space in front of her, the biting cold eating at her skin and muscles and soul, nothing to hear or see or taste or want.
They had torn the wanting from her.
Screams pierced the silence, the final wails of sentinels as one after the other fell to the dirty ground. Vaasa pushed to her hands first, dragging her scraped knees beneath her as her bones ached from the cold. She couldn’t stand upright.
“Reid,” she choked out in a hoarse whisper. “Reid!”
Weeks. She had been trapped here for weeks, listening to pleas and moans of other prisoners that she hadn’t been certain were real; echoes behind iron and stone could have been people or just figments of her isolated imagination. All she had were empty, disconnected details; no semblance of a schedule, the randomization of each day preventing her body from knowing the time. She was sure this prison had been constructed to bring her to the brink: the piercing chill, the silence, the darkness.
The dark was not an unfamiliar sensation to Vaasa. A long time ago, she had made a home of it, had found a way to see shadow as a place to hide. But this dark was frigid. Empty. Infinite.
The door to Vaasa’s cell screeched open, and a figure stood in the gray-washed glow. Broad shoulders, long mahogany hair, orange and black eyes that finally met her own. This moment was both salvation and dying, heartbreak and healing, it was everything, everything.
“Reid,” she choked once more, her elbows wobbling and then giving out beneath her. Her chin smacked against the ground as her weight toppled forward.
“Here!” his deep voice boomed. “She’s here!”
Reid was alive.
He had come for her.
Tears washed down Vaasa’s face as he rushed forward to her. She lurched, using the last of her energy to throw her body against his, to let him take her in his arms and steal her away from this wretched place. His warmth enveloped her, his body feeling so much bigger than hers as his arms wound around her waist and lifted her to her feet. Her torn slippers caught traction beneath her, but it was he who held her up, who carried the weight of her broken body.
“I have you,” he whispered against her blood-smeared cheek. His nose pressed to the spot just behind her ear. “I’m never letting you go again.”
Hot tears slipped down her cheeks. “I’m in love with you,” she whispered back, her voice only capable of that much. “I should have told you every day.”
Reid’s arm hooked behind her back as he gently helped her to the door of her cell. “You can, Wild One. You will.”
They turned the corner, and—
And then Vaasa was falling through the floor.
She wrenched her eyes open and saw nothing but black. The mist—it covered her vision, cloaked her entire face. Spinning around her in a glittering black void, Veragi magic stuffed itself down her throat and up her nose, muffling her screams. Strings of it tangled within her body, wrapped around her organs and pulled. She tossed her body to the right with as much power as she could muster, but her wrists were bound to the table. Vaasa screamed and pulled as hard as she could—
“Dammit!” a familiar voice swore.
The straps on her left wrist snapped with a hiss as her body spun off the side of the table. A hard, cold surface collided with her cheek, something slick coating her skin as the bone splintered in pain. The sensation exploded behind her right eye where she’d landed. Her shoulder felt as if it had been jerked right from its socket. The magic before her eyes extinguished, and her vision readjusted. Her right wrist was still bound to the table, and she hung from it, the rest of her body on the grimy floor while her cheek lay against the sturdy wooden leg of the table they’d bound her to. Blood trickled down her limbs in small streams from the thin hairline cuts carved into her thighs and upper arms. Small inflictions of pain that when added together became excruciating, though never enough to kill.
She opened her eyes and saw him: Lord Vlacik, staring down at her with his lip curled in disgust.
Vaasa struck.
Magic shot from her hands toward his icy blond head, a tendril of darkness flying forward like a thrown blade.
“Shit,” he cursed as he leapt to the side. “Chain her!”
Metal touched the skin of her neck, and she hissed in pain. Her magic winked out. Hands held her in place and forced an iron collar around her neck, clinking it closed. She bared her teeth and launched herself forward at the lord, but the sharp metal collar dug into her neck, secured to the table by an iron chain. She cried out as her body ricocheted backward.
“Get her back on the table,” Vlacik commanded.
Bile crawled up her throat, and she began to heave, hoisting herself on her side. There was nothing left in her, yet it came over and over—slick black waste, just like what she’d vomited up in Dihrah before Reid found her. She’d been on the verge of death then, and as she expelled unused Veragi magic now, Vaasa was certain she was closer to dying than she’d ever been.
This metal collar… it extinguished every breath of magic within her, a smothering leash. Once they had it on her, there was no escape. She was chained to the table, powerless.
“I said get her back on the table,” Lord Vlacik’s voice snapped, “and secure the straps tighter this time.”
Instinctual fear knotted in Vaasa’s stomach as her vision spun from the floor to the wall to the ceiling. A blond-haired man in a royal blue Asteryan uniform stood beside the table that held her, and she was on her back again, too tired to fight. Too confused.
A door opened. Ozik’s voice floated through the air. “Enough.”
“Sir—”
“I said enough,” Ozik repeated.
Through the haze of her pain and adrenaline, Vaasa realized where she was. Or, more precisely, where she wasn’t.
She wasn’t in Mireh. Or Dihrah. She wasn’t in Icruria at all.
And Reid wasn’t here.
Tears welled in her eyes. He wasn’t coming to find her. His footsteps had never sounded down this hall. It was just a place Vaasa retreated to in her mind when she couldn’t handle the reality around her.
Vaasa released the tension in her neck and let her head fall to the side, pounding cheek finding a semblance of relief on the cold iron table. Around her was a dimly lit chamber in the bowels of the prison, filled with exactly five other people. Ozik and two sentinels whose names she didn’t know stood by the door, iron keys hanging off their hips. Lord Vlacik stood to the right next to a wrinkled clergyman who sat at a metal countertop, hunched over a notebook as he scribbled observations. On that countertop were sharp objects: Thumbscrews, pronged forks, iron hoops with protruding spikes all sat waiting for the lord’s terrible touch. They gleamed in the candlelight.
Vaasa’s body recoiled at the memory of each of those tools against her flesh.
They did this almost daily. It had taken only once for Vaasa to realize that Lord Vlacik was working with the Asteryan clergy to uncover the secrets of Veragi magic—seeking answers Vaasa herself didn’t know. Where did this magic come from? What caused it to manifest in a person?
And Lord Vlacik’s personal mission: How could it be weaponized?
Vaasa was a mouse, the sacrificial subject of their experiments.
“Unless you want what we know—” Lord Vlacik started, but Ozik cut him off.
“Careful with your words, my lord, or you will find yourself as dead as your father.”
The room went silent.
Vaasa and Ozik’s connection came and went like the tides since she had ceded her powers to him to save Reid; some moments Ozik was silent to her, others his oily, slick magic was all she could feel in her veins. Whatever linked them was shaky and unpredictable. Each day Lord Vlacik did this to her, she lasted longer and felt more of Ozik’s magic tangling with her own. There were moments she swore it fueled the manifestations of her magic that Vlacik pried out of her. Ozik never intervened until she was at the edge of her tolerance, tipping over the side of a cliff.
As if while the lord tried to uncover what caused the magic to manifest, Ozik was building her endurance.
The treacherous advisor stepped forward to loom above her. Since the election, the traces of black in Ozik’s veins had disappeared, leaving only pale, porcelain skin and a cunning smile with far-too-straight teeth. His white hair brushed his shoulders, trimmed neatly and in direct contrast to the tangles of greasy black hair upon her own head. Ozik appeared stronger. Healthier. Perhaps even younger. His appearance was far closer to how she remembered it in her youth. By linking her magic to his, he had regained something that had been lost since her mother’s death.
His menacing gold eyes caught upon her cheek. Perhaps a bruise had already started to form.
“She has lasted longer than any of the other witches,” the lord muttered to the clergyman, who nodded in agreement.
“Of course she has,” Ozik said. “She is her mother’s daughter.”
Vaasa closed her eyes again. It all weighed on her weary mind; that Ozik had loved her mother—and that they’d been having an affair when he’d served as their family’s closest advisor—yet he’d killed her. Vena Kozár had made some kind of twisted bargain with Ozik to murder Vaasa’s father, but instead of then handing Ozik the throne, she sent Vaasa into the safety of a betrothal abroad and helped Dominik become ruler of Asterya.
And Ozik had murdered her for it.
Every day Vaasa spent in this prison, she wondered what her mother had been through. What she had faced alone while Vaasa’s resentment of her only grew. It was not lost on Vaasa that her mother was a relative stranger to her; she knew little of the truth.
“Did you do this to her, too?” Vaasa croaked out. “To the woman you loved?”
Ozik stared at her, lips drawn. Just as Vaasa’s magic had at the Icrurian election, it wrenched from her insides in a terrible tug. Each time he returned her magic to her, it burrowed into her bones and muscles as if hiding itself from him. Yet without even a flick of his hands or a shuttering of his eyes, Ozik took the power from her again in an instant. Vaasa groaned in pain, throat hoarse from the screaming she had already done.
“We’re making progress,” Lord Vlacik insisted. “Let me continue.”
“No,” Ozik replied, staring into Vaasa’s eyes. “Your time is up.”
“Ozik—”
“I said your time is up,” Ozik snarled, composure slipping. “I agreed to six weeks. No more, no less.”
Six weeks. That was how long she had been in this prison, then. Vaasa filed away the detail, wondering why Ozik had let such a thing slip. Did he want her to know how much time had passed?
“We have spent more time trying to keep her contained than we have learning anything,” Lord Vlacik argued. “Between her attempts to escape and her striking—”
“I fail to see how any of this is my problem,” Ozik interrupted. “You were promised six weeks, and six weeks have passed.” Vaasa watched him as he walked to the door. He looked back over his shoulder once, eyes lingering on her for only a moment before landing on the two sentinels waiting dutifully for a command. “Take her back to her cell.”
Lord Vlacik stormed out the door after Ozik, and Vaasa was left with the two sentinels and quiet clergyman who continued to jot down notes without bothering to look at her again. The sentinels undid the collar around her neck. It didn’t make a difference; Ozik had once again taken away her access to magic, leaving her empty and powerless. Vaasa’s wrist came free, and she let her arms sag against the table. Soon, they hauled her up and out of the room, but each step she took was a strain, knees wobbling. She fought to keep upright but lost, tripping over her own dragging feet, and the sentinels barely caught her. She came face-to-face with the iron keys at their belts, studying them, locking away every detail she could.
Now wasn’t the time to hatch an escape, but that time would come.
They carried her into a dark, narrow stairwell and up two flights of stairs until they stopped in front of her cell’s wooden door. She stared at the small window of iron bars upon it as one of the sentinels used his set of dangling keys to open it.
“Witch,” he sneered at her. He threw her in, and Vaasa slammed into the dirty floor. When she looked up, both sentinels had disappeared into the unquiet tomb.
Within this cell, all she could feel was the biting cold, the musty air, and the strange sense that though she was by herself, she wasn’t alone.
Excerpted from THE WICKED AND THE DAMNED by Rebecca Robinson. Copyright © 2026. Reprinted by permission of Saga Press at Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved.
