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.
99¢ on amazon.com through October 18 · Out now · Free with Kindle+
Then continue with The Vidauban Inheritance, out now →
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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 is dangerous. It is 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 · Out Now
The Vidauban Inheritance
Book Two of The Aster Legacy
Out now · Free with Kindle+
For five years they clipped her wings.
Now he sees her fly.
Her grandmother left her a painting. Her father and her stepmother left her everything else.
Theodora Vidauban comes home to Marseille after her first year at the Aster Academy wanting one quiet summer in her father's library before any of it starts again.
What she doesn't expect is Kallistos Korvinian at her father's Sunday lunch table.
Heir to the Marseille-Italian Korvinians. The man she was promised to at sixteen, who has not spoken to her in two years and has never once taken off the ring he was given the night they last touched.
The small panel her grandmother hid in the attic looks like an ordinary Provençal devotional piece: three Marys at an empty tomb, an angel on the rolled-back stone. It can be read three ways, and only the third one explains why patient men with patient money have spent decades hunting for it. One of them is already sitting at the Vidauban table.
Theodora has spent five years being told her body is the problem. She is about to find out what the real problem is.
Some inheritances hang on a wall. Hers sat down at the table.
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Book Three · Coming Next
The Asterion Pattern
Book Three of The Aster Legacy
Until 26 December 2026
For two years she could not speak the name.
Now the whole sea will hear it.
There is a name she has not said out loud in two years. Somebody made sure of that.
Iolanthe Drakos reads the Mediterranean the way other people read faces, in the weight that doesn't match the crate and the entry no one ever made. For two years she has been reading one silence in particular: the drowning of her cousin at the Aster Academy, filed as an accident and never opened again.
Then the old man who kept her family's records dies on the harbor steps, and what he leaves her points to a box the Drakos have kept sealed since 1847.
She has been writing to Lucan Asterion for eight months and has never once seen his face. He is the only other person alive who reads the world the way she does: she reads the networks, he reads the documents that move through them. Put the two halves together and a single protected hand runs unbroken from a fabricated disgrace in 1847 to the order that put her cousin in the water.
The people who wrote that order are still writing. One of them taught Iolanthe to keep everything off the manifest. One of them is family.
To drag it into daylight she will have to give up the house that made her, and finally say the name she has held behind her teeth.
She can read anything that moves through a harbor. Her own family took her longer.
Pre-order now · 26 December 2026
About The Aster Legacy
A castle in the Dolomites. Seven 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.
A few of the bloodlines are speaking. Teaser monologues from inside the fortress →
Eight bloodlines, a Council, and a rule about who may speak after midnight. Enter the Aster Archive → (assumes you have finished Book One)
Contact
For rights, press, or reader mail: claudia@claudiagabanich.com