“They call it a curse. I call it a lie someone has been protecting for twenty-two years — and I am the price.” When Amara Adeyemi comes home to Ijesun to bury her father, she braces herself for grief, not for the truth that arrives with it: every firstborn daughter in her bloodline has died before her twenty-third birthday for four generations straight. Hers is next. She tells herself it is superstition, the kind of story villages tell to explain bad luck. Then a woman in white starts waiting for her by the river at dusk. Then someone knocks three times on her bedroom door, every night, at the same hour. Then she finds a photograph of herself — taken before she was born. Kelechi, the chief's only son, is the one person in Ijesun who looks at her like she isn't already a ghost. He is also the one person she has been warned, by everyone who loves her, never to trust. As they dig into her family's past together, Amara falls for him one careful inch at a time — even as the truth around her grows teeth. Because the deeper they go, the clearer it becomes: the curse was never written by her family. It was written by his. Some secrets were never meant to survive the truth. Neither, everyone in Ijesun believed, was Amara.

On her seventeenth birthday, Riko Amano's life crumbled along with her father's debts. The enormous debt her father's company was burdened with came from the Midoji family, a vampire dynasty unknown to humans. In exchange for repayment, they demanded Riko's own life. On the stage of a masquerade ball, Riko was made to stand before a list of creditors and handed over to Midoji Ryo as the "bride of the contract." With all eyes in the venue on him, Ryo took Riko's hand and quietly said, "I'm sorry, but I can't have you dying." Riko would soon understand the meaning of those words. Ryo was under a curse. Once every hundred years, a woman he trusted would appear, and that woman would inevitably be murdered on her eighteenth birthday. This tragedy had already repeated itself three times. Riko was the fourth one. Trapped within the cage of her contract, Riko begins to notice the past memories sleeping within her—a strange sense of déjà vu, as if she has seen the same night as Ryo countless times. The time limit is the next birthday. The fate of death is approaching, and my heart is drawing closer. If I fall in love, it might only mean the same tragedy will repeat itself.