Naïve and inexperienced student Shelley Landers thinks the most exciting thing that would happen to her this year, besides graduating from college, would be her planned vacation with her two best friends to Switzerland, until she meets businessman Alex Crestwell. When charming vampire Alex Crestwell welcomes Shelley and her two friends to his Zurich hotel, he is immediately attracted to not only Shelley's beauty and wit but also her scent. Knowing human interaction is forbidden amongst his kind, he can't help but feel what she has awakened in him. Born of different worlds and bound by a desire they cannot deny, Shelley is thrust into a world of secrecy and danger, where rival vampire dynasties fight for power -a world she never knew existed. With the word on the streets of Paris that a First One has taken over the leadership of the Debauched, Queen Talitha is haunted by the dreams of her family who were slaughtered many years previous and entrusts Violette with her future plans for the Gramaze coven.