The Shadows Between Us

Name: The Shadows Between Us
Author: Tricia Levenseller

Goodreads: 3.7
pages: 304
July: 2017

Freya infiltrates a shadow king's court with a plan to seduce and destroy him. But the more time they spend together, the more her revenge fantasy crumbles under genuine connection. Love and revenge become impossible to separate.

What is The Shadows Between Us about?

Alessandra is not a good person, and she does not pretend to be. She has murdered one lover already, and now she has a plan: seduce the young Shadow King of Naxos, marry him, and kill him to take the throne for herself. She is intelligent, ruthless, and entirely comfortable with her own ambition.

The Shadow King, Kallias, is powerful, mysterious, and wrapped in literal shadows, magic that keeps everyone at arm's length because physical touch undoes it. He needs a political bride. Alessandra presents herself as the perfect candidate. What she did not plan for is actually liking him.

Kallias is kind. He is lonely. He is trying to be a good king in a court full of schemers. And the more time Alessandra spends as his fake-real-fake consort, the harder it becomes to maintain her plan. And the closer she gets, the more the untouchable king seems tempted to risk being touched.

Meanwhile, someone is trying to kill the king, someone besides Alessandra, and the court politics are more dangerous than she anticipated. The girl who came to commit murder finds herself solving one instead.

Read it if you want

Alessandra is a villain protagonist done right. Levenseller commits to her amorality without softening it into quirky charm. She is genuinely dangerous, and her internal monologue about seduction, manipulation, and power is entertaining precisely because she takes herself completely seriously.

The role reversal is the hook. Instead of a woman being seduced by a powerful man, Alessandra is the predator, and the discovery that her prey is actually someone worth caring about creates a tension that standard romance cannot.

Kallias is a cinnamon roll wrapped in shadow and power. His vulnerability makes Alessandra's growing conflict between ambition and affection feel genuine.

It is a standalone. Everything resolves in one book. The pacing is tight, the mystery is satisfying, and the romance earns its ending.

Content warnings

Show the content warnings

The protagonist has committed murder and plans to commit another. Sexual content (moderate to high). Court intrigue and assassination attempts. A character is untouchable due to powers that have killed people accidentally. Themes of ambition, manipulation, and whether love can coexist with selfishness. Brief violence. A protagonist who is explicitly morally grey.

Full plot and ending (spoilers)

Alessandra falls in love for real. Her plan to kill Kallias erodes as she gets to know him, and Levenseller never makes her suddenly good, she stays ambitious and calculating, just redirected toward keeping him alive.

Her scheming does catch up with her. Kallias finds out what she has been playing at and, rather than executing her for treason, banishes her from court. The separation forces the real choice. His shadows could let him live for centuries if he stays untouched, but he decides he wants Alessandra more than immortality, shows up where she is staying, apologizes, and asks her to come home as his wife.

So she gets everything she wanted at the start, crown included, just not the way she planned it. She marries a king she actually loves, and he gives up his shot at forever to be touchable.

Where it sits in the series

The Shadows Between Us was published as a standalone and Alessandra's story wraps up completely. In 2024 Levenseller added The Darkness Within Us, a companion sequel following Alessandra's older sister Chrysantha. Either works on its own, but this one first is the natural order.