Wealth at the Cost of a Soul

Every wish has an exchange rate, and no one ever tells you the price until it has already been spent.Alexander Vorontsov is twenty-nine, freezing in a Moscow apartment with a broken radiator, and holding his twenty-third rejection letter. Four years and two hundred and eleven pages of a novel he still believes in have earned him nothing but polite refusals and a debt to the bartender who lent him forty euros he can't repay. Then an email arrives about the estate of a man he has never heard of — and names him sole beneficiary of a fortune that will change everything he thought he knew about his family, his talent, and himself.The inheritance comes with a man attached to it — elegant, ageless, and unfailingly honest in the way that only makes him more dangerous. He has worn a dozen names across a dozen centuries: the Baron in Vienna, Monsieur Levoir in Petersburg, Lucian de Valmor in the drawing rooms of London. He does not lie, and he does not need to. He offers wishes. He collects the interest later, in currency no bank can measure — a little warmth, a little grief, a little conscience, gone so gradually that its absence can feel, for a while, almost like peace.Alexander is not alone in what follows. Grigory Sokolov, his roommate and oldest friend, refuses to let success turn him into a stranger. Elena, a researcher with a talent for finding what powerful people would rather stay buried, traces the bargain back through six family lines and three centuries of quietly ruined lives. And Camille Aurousseau, a sculptor whose work cuts through numbness like nothing else can, gives him back a reason to fight for the parts of himself the ledger hasn't yet claimed.Lucian de Valmor has never once been forced to break a promise, because he has never needed to. Desire does the work for him. He is patient, generous, and utterly without mercy — a curator of ruined fortunes who has watched a hundred and forty years of Vorontsovs build their own undoing out of wishes they were too hungry to examine closely enough. Now it is Alexander's turn to decide what he is willing to become, and what he refuses to let his children inherit.Spanning decades, continents, and generations of a single haunted bloodline, Wealth at the Cost of a Soul is the story of what it actually costs to get everything you ever wanted — and the quiet, stubborn defiance it takes to want something else instead.If you love: Faustian bargains, generational curses, ageless immortal antagonists, and slow-burn redemption arcs — this is your next read.