I'm a pawn in a brewing mafia war, a captive bride in a power play between two cold-blooded monsters. My father sold me to the devil: an arranged marriage with Dante Torrio, sadistic capo and would-be Boss. But before their bargain is complete, I'm stolen away by Luca Vitale, heir to the Vitale crime family. I hate Luca for forcing me into marriage, but he'll do anything to mold me into his obedient wife. The longer I remain trapped with him, the more I come to crave the dark pleasure my unyielding husband offers me. He is fiercely possessive and jealously guards me. He protects me from his enemies, especially Dante, who is determined to steal me back. Which fate would be worse? To belong to the ruthless mafia prince or to the devil himself?

A new account of racial logics in premodern Islamic literature. In Black Knights, Rachel Schine reveals how the Arabic-speaking world developed a different form of racial knowledge than their European neighbors during the Middle Ages. Unlike in European vernaculars, Arabic-language ideas about ethnic difference emerged from conversations extending beyond the Mediterranean, from the Sahara to the Indian Ocean. In these discourses, Schine argues, racialized blackness became central to ideas about a global, ethnically inclusive Muslim world. Schine traces the emergence of these new racial logics through popular Islamic epics, drawing on legal, medical, and religious literatures from the period to excavate a diverse and ever-changing conception of blackness and race. The result is a theoretically nuanced case for the existence and malleability of racial logics in premodern Islamic contexts across a variety of social and literary formations.

A warrior born and raised, Helena of Rivenloch is desperate to save her youngest sister from a fate worse than death - marriage. After trying and failing to murder the groom, she does the next best thing. She takes his right-hand knight, the dashing Colin du Luc, as her hostage.