Wicked Endeavors

Book 1: Wicked Endeavors

by Kamilah Cole

Genres: Sword & Sorcery

Synopsis

Perfect for fans of The Shadows Between Us and Powerless, this high stakes romantasy follows a vengeful teen who cons her way into an elite society of tyrannical witches. But her warring feelings for two people—an enemy prince and her childhood friend—could ruin everything.

Caya was once the ward of Coventry’s royal family…until they were killed by the three witch Houses that now rule the peninsula.
 
Now eighteen, Caya plans to infiltrate the witches' glittering world to enact justice. With the help of a mysterious benefactor, she adopts the persona of Marisol Vinyet, a disarmingly beautiful aristocrat. As Marisol, she'll attend the annual Coronet, a cutthroat social season during which witches increase their power by binding new members to their Houses. The Coronet will draw even the prince of neighboring Domingo—Tomás Castellan—to the peninsula just in time for “Marisol” to kill him. After all, his family set the witches upon Coventry in the first place.
 
But Tomás is more charming than Caya ever anticipated. Worse, her estranged childhood friend, Bas Arroyo, is the prince’s protector, and she struggles to control her complicated feelings for him.
 
To take down the witches from within, Caya will have to keep both her identity and her desperate heart under wraps: Although she’s made herself a weapon, she might be the one to bleed.  

Release date: September 8, 2026

Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers

Print pages: 336

Sample

DESPERATION WAS A POWERFUL MOTIVATOR. CATALEYA Donant let it push her to rise before the sun.

She hadn’t slept, because she wasn’t a morning person, and she needed to be a morning person for her plan to work. The other children in the orphanage were still sleeping, her shared room a chorus of even breaths, light snores, and the nonsense that Sofía always murmured under her breath. Caya got dressed in silence, finger-combed her curls, and crept out into the hallway. She could hear the matrons downstairs making everything perfect for today’s scheduled tours. Everything needed to be perfect—but not for them.

After all, in a truly perfect world, today was the day Caya would be adopted.

At seventeen, her chances were laughable. Aspiring parents wanted newborns and toddlers, children they could nurture young enough to overcome any perceived flaws in their nature. Even three weeks into the Coronet, Kindred Orphanage saw increased foot traffic from welks hoping to add to their own familial numbers or witches hoping to seem like magnanimous benefactors to their neighbors and inferiors. Every year, she hoped and she tried. Every year, she was passed over for the younger children.

Caya had come to the orphanage at eight years old, and the matrons’ eyes had filled with the kind of pity that made it clear they knew what she didn’t: She would never have a family again. For a while, she had accepted that. The matrons became her parents. The other orphans became her siblings. She played games and did chores and had three meals a day under a roof that only sometimes leaked. But with her eighteenth birthday approaching, her bed would be emptied to make room for a newer, younger orphan—and Caya would be turned out on the streets to make her own way in the world. If this was her last chance, she would give it her all.

The streets of Rojanea were unkind to a woman alone.

Caya glided down the stairs, coming to a stop by the broom closet. The door hung open, most of the cleaning supplies removed for use, but she found a mop and a bucket near the back. She followed the hum of voices to the dining hall, where Mother Lupe and Mother Felicia were having a loud argument about whose turn it was to chop the onions for tonight’s stew. Mother Lupe wore a simple pale blue dress with a wide skirt beneath a half apron; Mother Felicia was in mint green, her braids hidden beneath a matching bonnet that was dotted with fake pearls. Caya knew they were fake because she’d stolen one once, only to be laughed out of the market stall where she’d tried to fence it. A valuable lesson, in more ways than one.

Both matrons turned to look at her, suspicion lighting their eyes. Caya beamed.

“I thought you might need some extra hands to prepare for the day,” she said, lifting the bucket and shaking it for emphasis. “Where do you want me?”

Mother Felicia folded her arms. “I want you to return upstairs. Whatever trouble you’ve come to start—”

“No trouble, Mother. My only goal is to do what I can.”

For some reason, this only made them more suspicious. Granted, Caya had a long and fond history with trouble. She didn’t chase it, but it still found her to be an engaging companion. She was particularly good at getting other children into it, as most mischief in the orphanage could be traced back to one of her suggestions. Wouldn’t it be fun to go cliff diving? I bet you couldn’t put this pin on Mother Lupe’s chair without getting caught. How many spice buns can we steal before they notice?

Boredom was as powerful a motivator as desperation, and Caya was so often bored.

Today, she drew herself up to her full height, squared her shoulders, and adopted her most innocent expression. “I know I’m too old to catch the eye of any of the parents, but I want to help wherever I can. You won’t hear a word from me otherwise. I swear it.”

Mother Felicia looked at Mother Lupe. Mother Lupe looked at Mother Felicia. Caya imagined herself as a player in a troupe, giving the performance of a lifetime. Her honest expression was etched in immovable stone, and her body language remained open and guileless.

“All right,” said Mother Lupe, swiping a hand over her freckled cheeks. “If only because we’re behind and could use extra hands.”

Kindred had made sure that Caya, like all the children in the home, was no stranger to work. There was a chore schedule made fresh at the start of every week, posted in their rooms and in the kitchen, and adhered to as closely as the laws of the land. Caya was meant to work the gardens, laying mulch and plucking weeds, but, if there was ever a time to do more than her share, it was here and now.

Her callused hands scrubbed pots and pans, mopped wooden floors, swept thick carpets. She dusted windowsills and straightened wooden frames, chopped vegetables for stew and beat the dirt out of welcome mats. By the time the sun rose, her cheeks had darkened from the exercise, and she’d made herself so useful that the matrons didn’t send her upstairs when the first of the parents began to arrive.

Stifling a yawn, Caya spun into the entrance hall.

It was already sparkling, but the matrons were too busy sycophanting to notice. The couple in the doorway were dressed in the latest fashion: the woman in flared sleeves with an embroidered bodice, the man in a plum tunic and dark breeches. Pearls lined her neck. Gold rings decorated his fingers. They wore their wealth as if they were walking museums, eager to show off, which meant that they had come into money very recently. The old families—even the ones who had lost their lands and their titles after the coup—tended to be more modest in their appearance. The amount of ducado they had to spend was revealed in their entitlement, their power, not in gold and jewels gaudily splashed over their bodies.

For a moment, Caya fell backward into a memory of palace floors and silk sheets, imported desserts and carriage rides. A musical giggle rang in her ears, a relic from another time. A better time. A time when the Seawards reigned.

Then she forced herself back to the present, where she was a beggar in need of someone, anyone, to give her a home.

Caya smiled. “Welcome to Kindred!”

The couple peered at her over Mother Lupe’s shoulder. She saw the matron tense, clearly debating whether to excuse Caya or ignore her entirely, and she returned to her unnecessary work with the kind of demure industriousness she hoped these people wanted to see. Maybe she was too old to be a daughter, but she could certainly be a servant. A permanent place in a household would still be better than the streets, even if that place was on her knees with her elbows buried in dirty water.

Mother Lupe stepped to the side to allow the couple farther into the house. Although it neared autumn, it was still a hot day, the air outside thick with humidity. The man waved a hand in front of his sweating face, and a handkerchief appeared between his fingertips. He wiped it over his skin until he was pink-cheeked but dry.

Caya’s smile cracked.

He was a witch.

As the man passed the cloth to his companion, Caya’s fingers tightened around the handle of her broom. A crafter from House Vida, then, stopping in before the next Coronet event.

Every summer, the magical upper class reminded the welks of Coventry of their place by excluding them from their festivities. The social season known as the Coronet promised six weeks of galas and balls, dinner parties and charity showcases—but it also promised six weeks of cutthroat political scheming. The more witches bound to a House, the more powerful that House’s magic, and the Coronet was their yearly excuse to recruit.

Caya remembered a time before Coventry had been ruled by these selfish magic wielders, who had fled persecution in the neighboring country of Domingo to find sanctuary under the reign of Coventry’s royal family, the Seawards. These magic wielders had betrayed the Seawards by overthrowing them and replacing their dynasty with three new High Houses—one for each type of witch magic—led by three elected Magisters. They crushed dissent with increasing violence and restrictive laws until there were very few welks left with the time or energy to fight back.

Though she had loved the Seawards, Caya didn’t hate witches enough to join any sort of rebellion. She knew one brewed in the corners of Rojanea, but that was the kind of trouble she didn’t court. Still, she would never feel comfortable around witches. Ten years was not enough for her to forget what they’d done. What they’d taken.

The witches had been banished from Domingo, but Coventry became more and more like their former lands every day. Buildings cropped up in the Domingan style. People had adopted the Domingan fashions. Food was a mix of Coventry staples and Domingan essentials.

It was a strange thing, to watch her country’s death rattle in real time. Soon, there would be no one left to miss what it had been like before.

Caya swallowed at the direction her thoughts had taken, slipping out of the room before the couple could try to talk to her. As desperate as she was to be adopted today, she wasn’t desperate enough to live with witches. She already woke up every day thinking of what she’d lost and who had destroyed it. It had taken her eight of the last ten years to pare down her rage to something bearable; eight years of being so angry, it had felt like an inferno burning through her small body; eight years of nightmares and acting out and spitting on the ground in silent disrespect when the witches passed by in their carriages.

She had learned to accept the cost of witches. The justice they would never face. The privilege they would never relinquish.

But she would never accept their charity.

By the time the sun was ready to fall asleep, Caya was rethinking her morals.

A long day had grown longer when the other orphans had finally gotten up to find half a room full of prospective parents waiting to meet them. Caya had been ignored by not two, not four, but twelve different couples, their eyes glazed and their smiles vacant when she spoke to them, only for those same expressions to light up when one of the children under six came by. People melted while rocking infants in their arms, radiating a love that made Caya burn with longing. Others sat with the three-year-olds in the back garden, listening intently to their rambling speeches about coloring and playing games.

The man she’d seen first turned out to be the only witch in the market to expand his family, but no one wanted a seventeen-year-old about to age out of her bed. It didn’t matter how friendly, hardworking, or dedicated she appeared. She was nothing to them but a distraction, at best, from what they’d really come for.

Even while staying up last night, she’d known that she’d be auditioning for a part that no one wanted her to play. And yet her foolish, foolish heart had actually hoped.

Outside, with no one to judge her, Caya pressed the heels of her palms against her eyelids to keep the tears from falling. She would survive. She had before, and she would again. She shouldn’t waste time being hurt that an impossibility had turned out to, in fact, be impossible.

“One should never berate oneself for hoping,” said a male voice. “To hope is to be human.”

Caya whirled around with her fists raised, even though all she knew about fighting was from childhood tussles. Standing by the back fence, limned in the blood orange of the setting sun, was an unfamiliar man in a flat cap that covered most of his straight black hair. He wore a black jerkin with gold thread lining, a white standing collar, and paned gold trunk hose that disappeared into black boots. A thick mustache and neat beard covered his olive-skinned face, and his eyes were big and brown on either side of a small button nose. His eyebrows were as thick as his lips, his ears as big and round as his cheeks, and he was watching her with a serenity that suggested he’d been standing there too long.

She took a step back toward the house, crushing myrtle flowers and newly planted fig trees underfoot. “Who are you?”

“An interested party,” said the man, nodding at the building. “But it seems I’ve come too late for adoption day.”

Caya glanced at the sky behind the stranger, an encroaching navy blue already peppered with stars and a full moon, and then back at him. “Then why are you still here?”

“I was hoping to make an impassioned case. But then I overheard your… crisis.”

Her eyes narrowed. “I didn’t say anything.”

“One hopeless soul can recognize another.” He pressed a hand to his chest, and she noted that his nails were clean and well-kept. “At my age, hope is in short supply. But I think that we can help one another, Cataleya Donant.”

“No, thank you.” She turned toward the open doorway and made it three steps before freezing with her hand on the doorknob. Slowly, her heart seizing with discomfort, she met the stranger’s gaze again. “I never told you my name.”

“Your reaction just did.” His eyes were bright with a fervor that Caya neither shared nor wanted. “Cataleya Donant. At last. After the coup, I thought…”

A chill ran down her spine. In the days after she’d lost everything, Caya had been in shock. Adrift and grieving. Hungry and alone. By the time she’d been taken in by Kindred, it hadn’t occurred to her to go by a different name. She’d been eight years old. She’d known nothing of strategy or subterfuge. The closest thing she’d had to a plan had been to find a new home, one where she could sleep through the night without clutching a weapon and where her ribs no longer jutted through her skin as if her body had grown more teeth to eat her with.

“Who are you?” she asked, her fear retreating behind a protective shield of anger. “What do you want?”

“My name is Gaspar Ruiz.” He removed his cap to sweep into a practiced bow. There was a smile on his face as he replaced it at a slight angle on his head. “And I want what you have, Caya: potential.”

Whatever that was supposed to mean.

“Gaspar Ruiz,” Caya said, “adoption day is over. Leave, or I’ll call the matrons to make you leave.”

As far as fibs went, it wasn’t her best work. If he went inside, the matrons would take one look at his expensive clothes and fine manners and welcome him to take as many children as his potential carriage could carry. But his sudden appearance and cryptic words disturbed something deep inside her, and she had to start listening to her instincts if she was going to make a life for herself on her own. Again.

For the second time, she tried to leave. And, for the second time, his words stopped her in her tracks.

“There is more power in this world than the magic the witches wield, Miss Donant. At least, for those willing to take it. I’ve been looking for you all these years because I think that you have the skill and fortitude to take control of your own destiny, as I have.”

Even though Caya didn’t turn around this time, there was a smirk in his voice that implied he could hear the raucous pounding of her pulse, the terrible lure of curiosity that dangled in the back of her mind.

“We will see one another again,” he promised. “And you’ll be very glad that we did.”

THE NEXT FEW DAYS PASSED IN SILENT DREAD AS CAYA waited for Gaspar Ruiz to resurface. Children were adopted. Beds opened up. Money came in. Not that Caya saw any of it. The matrons either ignored her or circled her like vultures, waiting for her eighteenth birthday and their freedom from her antics. Part of her wanted to tell them about Ruiz then, as proof that she was worth something to someone, but the rest of her was too suspicious of his intentions.

If he remembered her from those awful days, if he’d been looking for her since then… it couldn’t be for anything good.

“We could take the money and run,” said Rodrigo, as they wound their way into the city proper. He had a head of amber curls, hazel eyes, and a sour disposition, but, like Caya, he was the expendable age of seventeen and thus more of a servant than a dependent. “Leave on our own terms instead of theirs.”

“This is why they had me carry the money,” Caya replied. “And if you think this is enough ducado to live off of, then I’m already worried for you.”

Rojanea, the capital of Coventry, was first built centuries ago as a city of terra-cotta roof tiles and white stucco exteriors. In many ways, it still was, but it had also transformed itself for the ongoing Coronet. Local businesses had switched to selling the kind of baubles that witches coveted during the season just to stay afloat. Her favorite empanada stall had been replaced by a vendor who sold bolts of fabric that no one but a House witch could afford. Even the stores that did survive—such as the grocer they were heading toward—did so by stocking basic items both welks and witches could use.

Rodrigo paused to frown at an empty shop front. Caya couldn’t remember what had been there, and it made her desperately sad. The more her memories were overwritten, the faster Rojanea would turn into a mausoleum to her old life. Sometimes, though, she wished that she could forget. She wanted to see the beauty of Coventry without smelling the phantom blood that had been spilled to create this version of it.

She would never forgive, but sometimes she thought it might be easier to forget.

A shadow peeled from the side of the building, resolving into the shape of a person whom Caya and Rodrigo hadn’t noticed leaning there. A tattered dress hung from the bony frame of a young woman with dark curls and darker eyes, which sank into her face above hollow cheeks. Caya forced herself to make eye contact, remembering all too well how easy it was for people to look away from the unhoused as though their existence was contagious. Before she’d found Kindred, she’d felt invisible, salt in the wound of her hunger and hatred.

Rodrigo swore. “Ofelia?”

Ofelia. Now that he’d said it, Caya could connect the name to the hardened face. They had last seen Ofelia on her eighteenth birthday a year ago, when she’d been expelled from Kindred to make her own way in the world. They hadn’t kept in touch—the orphans rarely kept in touch—but still Caya hadn’t expected to see this lifeless expression on kindhearted Ofelia’s face. She’d taken on extra chores when the other children were too sick, or too lazy, to do them. She’d been a baker so good, they’d all been sure she’d be added to the kitchen staff of a good household. She’d left with so much potential in every step.

Now she looked like a wraith. Her tongue darted out to lick her dry lips.

“Coin to spare?” Her voice rasped from her throat. Her gaze darted between them without a hint of recognition. “I can—”

“Yes, we have coin,” Caya said, desperate to stop Ofelia from making any sort of offer in exchange.

Without being asked, Rodrigo stepped in front of her so she could turn and count out enough ducado to spare without returning to Kindred with too few groceries to feed everyone. She handed the money to him, and he passed it to Ofelia. Her narrow fingers snatched it, as though used to people pulling it away.

“Ofelia,” Rodrigo said again, miserably. “Are—are you here every day? We could try and come back with…” He trailed off, eyebrows knitting together. He knew as well as Caya did that they had just offered all they could. They had more than Ofelia, but that didn’t mean they had much at all. “I’m so sorry.”

Ofelia shook her head, as though warding off any lucidity that would bring the reality of her situation crashing down on her. She backed toward the alleyway, watching them with wary eyes, until she was nothing but shadows once more. Caya whispered her name so softly that the wind carried it away, ignoring the sting of tears. She remembered too well that life, that slow death. She was so close to returning to it.

Rodrigo turned, his fists clenched at his sides. They were both so close.

“We should keep going,” he said tonelessly. “The matrons will start thinking we actually ran off with the money.”

“Yeah.” Caya cast one last look at the alley. It was an effort to take another step, to leave a former Kindred orphan to this fate, but she had to. She had to. “Yeah, let’s go.”

The city center opened up before them, a cobblestone plaza surrounded by theaters and museums, historic buildings and wild bars. It was the jewel of Rojanea—of the entire country—and it had thrived even when Seaward Palace had been destroyed in favor of the three Houses. Those elaborate buildings watched from the green hills to the north, south, and west, remote and unwelcoming to anyone who didn’t bear that Hous. . .