Title: Between Sin and Ruin
Duet: Ruinous Duet #1
Author: SS Rayne
Genre: Dark Romance; Psychological Romance
Tropes: Release Date: May 15, 2026
In the Dominion, marriage wasn’t about love.
It was about power, loyalty, and survival.
I knew that when I said my vows.
I learned how to be still.
How to be perfect.
How to stand beside a man like Alaric Kostas—heir to an empire built on blood—and never let him see where I could break.
And for a while, I didn’t.
Because Alaric didn’t destroy what belonged to him.
He protected it.
Controlled it.
Closed his hand around it until there was nowhere left to run.
I let him.
I let him build a world around me that looked like devotion and felt like ownership.
Until the night I saw something I was never meant to see.
That was the night the illusion died.
The night I stopped being his perfect wife, and remembered exactly what I was capable of becoming.
It was about power, loyalty, and survival.
I knew that when I said my vows.
I learned how to be still.
How to be perfect.
How to stand beside a man like Alaric Kostas—heir to an empire built on blood—and never let him see where I could break.
And for a while, I didn’t.
Because Alaric didn’t destroy what belonged to him.
He protected it.
Controlled it.
Closed his hand around it until there was nowhere left to run.
I let him.
I let him build a world around me that looked like devotion and felt like ownership.
Until the night I saw something I was never meant to see.
That was the night the illusion died.
The night I stopped being his perfect wife, and remembered exactly what I was capable of becoming.
🚨 Author’s Note
This is a dark romance and explores themes of power, control, and betrayal, including one instance of infidelity.
This is a duet, and the central couple’s HEA unfolds in Book 2.
This is a dark romance and explores themes of power, control, and betrayal, including one instance of infidelity.
This is a duet, and the central couple’s HEA unfolds in Book 2.
Inspired by psychological thrillers, crime dramas, and the beautifully disastrous side of human emotion, her books explore toxic devotion, dangerous power dynamics, feminine rage, and the thin line between love and ruin.
When she isn’t writing destructive fictional couples, she’s usually reading, spending time with her family, wrangling animals, and losing arguments with the morally questionable voices in her head demanding she writes their story.
