

When the apocalypse arrives and Rosie Dixon is moments from death, a figure cuts through the horde with terrifying precision. The Zombie King's crimson eyes find only her: come with me. It takes her a beat to realize the most powerful undead creature in existence is Henry Miller, the boy who has quietly loved her for years. The horrors don't stop there. At the Miller family villa, his elegantly undead parents offer her raw meat and call her daughter-in-law with impeccable manners. Then her academic advisor calls with the real news: the cure requires the Zombie King's genetic material. Have a baby. Save the world. Rosie looks at Henry—cuddly and clingy by day, lethal and devoted by night—and opens a dating tutorial. First: win his heart. Then: handle the apocalypse.

At eighteen, Nancy Green earns the highest college entrance score in the entire county, and her parents respond by spending ten times her tuition on a motorized tricycle for her brother. With her dream about to die in a mountain village, it is her uncle who quietly sells the family’s last three sheep and presses the money into her hands without ceremony. Nancy carries that sacrifice like a weight and a wing, into a cutthroat corporate world where she battles betrayal and manipulation until she has built a billion-dollar empire from nothing. She confronts the parents who bled her dry with cold, clear-eyed finality. Then her uncle falls gravely ill, and on his deathbed whispers: hate will drag you down. It cracks open something she has armored for twenty years. In the end, Nancy founds a scholarship fund bearing his memory and gives other mountain girls the door someone once opened for her.