Claudia A. Gabanich
The Eighth Lineage
Book One of The Aster Legacy
She was trained to destroy them.
No one trained her to love one.
Free with Kindle Unlimited at launch · Releases 3 September 2026
Until 3 September 2026
Trust is a weapon. So is she.
Vespera Astor has trained her whole life for one mission: infiltrate Aster Academy — the castle fortress where seven ancient bloodlines rule the world from the shadows — and bring it down from the inside. She has a forged name, a flawless cover, and no memory of ever being anyone else.
What she doesn't have is a plan for Aldevar Voss.
Heir to the most powerful lineage at Aster. A Senate member at twenty-two. Brilliant, watchful, and far too good at seeing the things she's built her life around hiding. Wanting him isn't just dangerous — it's a betrayal of everything she was made to be.
Then a first-year turns up dead, her final recording cut short by a scream, and the trail leads to a lineage struck from every record. A name no one will speak.
The eighth.
The deeper Vespera digs, the closer the truth comes to her own reflection — and the more she fears the enemy she was sent to destroy may be the only family she has left.
Some secrets are written in blood. Hers was written before she was born.
Book Two · Coming Next
The Vidauban Inheritance
Book Two of The Aster Legacy
For five years they clipped her wings.
Now he sees her fly.
Her grandmother left her a painting. Her father left her a lie. Her stepmother left her a wound.
Theodora Vidauban comes home to Marseille after her first year at the Aster Academy expecting heat, her father's library, and one quiet summer before everything starts again.
What she doesn't expect is Kallistos Korvinian at her father's Sunday lunch table.
The heir of the Marseille-Italian Korvinians. The man she was promised to at sixteen. The man who has not spoken to her in two years. The man who has not once removed the ring he was given the night they last touched.
The small allegorical painting her grandmother hid in the attic is a Provençal-school devotional panel: three Marys at an empty tomb, a rolled stone, an angel. It is also three things at once. Surface. Iconograph. Ledger. What her grandmother hid is what patient men with patient money have spent decades looking for. One of them is already at the Vidauban table.
Theodora has spent five years being told her body is the problem.
She is about to learn what the real problem is.
Some inheritances are paintings. Hers was a man, a name, and a war.
Coming Fall 2026
Book Three
The Asterion Pattern
Some networks have been listening for two hundred years.
Iolanthe Drakos and Lucan Asterion. Coming 2027.
About The Aster Legacy
A castle in the Dolomites. Eight bloodlines that have ruled from the shadows for nine hundred years. One Academy that has been quietly making and unmaking the people who walk its corridors, generation after generation.
The Aster Legacy is a place-anchored romance series. The Academy is the constant; the characters rotate. Every book is a standalone love story, a different heroine, a different danger, a different reckoning, and together they are the story of a world that outlasts everyone who passes through it.
The conspiracies are old. The lineages are older. The wanting, when it surfaces, does not wait.
Every reader has a way in.
Read Chapter One — free
Get the first chapter of The Eighth Lineage free — no spoilers, just the first taste of Aster. Plus first word on launches, cover reveals, ARC sign-ups, and bonus material from inside the fortress. No spam — just secrets worth keeping.