There’s something intoxicating about a girl who wants revenge more than she wants to be good. Silvercloak, L.K. Steven’s adult debut, understands this deeply. It’s a darkly glittering entry into the ‘romantasy’ canon, full of blood, betrayal, and the kind of desire that eats away at you from the inside out. It’s messy,magic-drenched and morally grey in all the right places. It asks: what happens when the thing you hate most becomes the only place you feel seen?
Saffron Killoran is a girl carved by vengeance. Twenty years after the brutal massacre of her family by the Bloodmoons who are dark mages searching for a necromancer and leaving only blood in their wake, she’s clawed her way into Silvercloak Academy — a detective training ground of the elite. She acts not out of duty or ambition, but to tear the Bloodmoons down from the inside. When her lies catch up to her, Saffron is forced into a more dangerous role: infiltrating the very gang that orphaned her. She becomes a spy embedded in their underworld, sustained by a cruel kind of hope and a magic system powered by both pleasure and pain.
The magic is worth lingering on. Steven’s world imagines pain and pleasure as two sides of the same power source. Magic flares in moments of intensity: whipped backs, moaned names, wrists bitten and kissed. There’s a rawness to it, a closeness to sex and survival that feels as much about character as it is about worldbuilding. It’s not just power — it’s how power feels.
And then there’s Levan, the kingpin’s heir, all brutal softness and haunted eyes. He’s the boy prophesied to die by Saffron’s hand, the boy she should hate, the boy she inevitably wants. Their romance simmers under layers of mistrust, violence, and aching inevitability. He has a fallowwolf (a supernatural hound)at his side and a graveyard in his gaze. She has a dagger behind every smile. They orbit each other like stars set on a collision course, and watching them burn is deliciously painful.
Steven writes yearning like it’s a full-body experience. The desire here is slow, sharp, and never clean. The sex scenes are tender and raw, but the intimacy is in the in-between: the way Levan watches Saffron like she’s a myth he’s afraid of believing in, the way she can’t stop imagining killing him even when he’s whispering her name. It’s enemies-to-lovers in the messiest, most devastating way — not a soft romance, but a desperate one. A love forged in the same fire that burned everything else down.
And yet, Silvercloak isn’t just a love story. It’s a story about masks and the cost of wearing them too long; about girlhood as performance and punishment, about rage and what happens when it curdles into something quieter, colder. There’s a cruelty to the choices Saffron makes, and Steven doesn’t flinch away from it. This isn’t a redemption arc. It’s an origin story.
That being said, not every part of Silvercloak lands with the same precision. The first half is stronger than the second, which occasionally stumbles under the weight of plot twists and setup for future books. Saffron’s sharp-edged cunning sometimes slips into recklessness, and while that could be chalked up to emotional instability, it occasionally feels like convenience rather than character. Some side characters, especially the women, feel underwritten, used more as narrative devices than people.
But when Silvercloak works, it sings. The writing is cinematic without being overwrought, and the stakes are deeply emotional, not just magical. Steven has a gift for crafting characters who are terrible to each other in the most beautiful ways. It reminded me, in tone if not in setting, of books like The Atlas Six and The Poppy War. A dark academia energy with sharp teeth and tragic sapphics behind every corner.
“This is how villains are born,” Saffron thinks, watching herself become the very thing she was taught to destroy. And maybe that’s the most compelling part of Silvercloak, it lingers in what it means to be monstrous. It seduces you with it, asks you if maybe,just maybe, you want to be a little monstrous too.
This is a story about choosing the knife, even when your hands are shaking. It’s about the girls who survived the fire and came back with matches. It’s about power, what it costs, and why we’re willing to pay for it with our bodies, our hearts, our softness.
Silvercloak is not neat. It is not kind. But it’s a hell of a beginning.
Silvercloak was published on 22nd July by Penguin Random House.