The Solara city wants me dead. Nothing new.I’m Victor Crow — bounty hunter, Sump rat, professional disaster — and I’ve spent my whole life doing whatever it takes to keep my sister alive. Cage fights. Contract kills. Running jobs that don’t survive daylight. It’s not glamorous, but it’s mine.
Then the High Chancellor opens the Military Selection to all tiers for the first time in three centuries. The prize? Full citizenship. Tier-1 medical access. An actual cure for my sister.
The catch? Survive a death tournament designed to remind people like me exactly where we belong.
I should say no. I know I should say no.
But then there’s Lucius — the Chancellor’s son, my best friend for eight years, the one person in this entire rotting city-state I would burn everything down for. He needs out just as bad as I do.
So we go in together. We probably should’ve talked about what happens when he looks me in the eyes in front of the entire city — and destroys me anyway.
Turns out the boy I trusted with everything had a deal I didn’t know about. Turns out I was the price.
Now I’m branded, betrayed, and buried in a toxic wasteland where the rain eats your skin. They think Victor Crow is dead. They think I’ll rot in the Rust with the other forgotten things.
Big mistake.
This city took everything from me. I’m taking it back.
The Solara Chronicles is a dystopian M/M slow-burn about betrayal, survival, and two people who keep choosing each other even when the whole system is designed to make them choose otherwise. Blood, loyalty, paper cranes, and a city that deserves everything coming to it. Perfect for fans of Fourth Wing, Red Rising, and morally gray situationships.
Content Notes: graphic violence & gore, parental/emotional abuse, medical trauma, pervasive strong language (f-bombs are structural to the narrator’s mental health), extreme class oppression, body horror/biomechanical mutations, torture, forced combat, and devastating betrayal.
