The Villain Books in Order

The Villain is the darkest corner of Victoria Vale's historical romance world. The books begin with Hart, a short prequel that sketches the wound behind Adam Callahan, Earl of Hartmoor, and then open fully in The Villain and The Dove, where revenge, obsession, and desire collide in the Scottish Highlands.

The setting does a lot of work here.

These are not bright London ballroom romances, even when society still matters. Much of the action turns on bleak estates, long memories, and a hero who has spent years carefully destroying the family he blames for his sister's ruin. When Lady Daphne Fairchild travels north to demand answers, she walks straight into a bargain that is cruel, intimate, and almost impossible to escape. The duet thrives on that tension between vengeance and attraction, and on the question of whether Adam is capable of laying his anger down before it burns everything around him.

Vale keeps the emotional stakes high, but she does not stop with the central couple. The Butterfly and The Damsel stay in the same orbit while shifting attention to other damaged people touched by that world. In The Butterfly, a long-buried class-crossed love story becomes a book about recovery and tenderness after terrible harm. In The Damsel, grief, control, fear, and desire all get knotted together in a romance that asks what healing can look like when trust has been badly broken.

This is Vale at her moodiest.

What links the books is not just shared characters. It is the feeling. These romances lean Gothic, with possessive love interests, shadowed pasts, and a sense that private damage keeps leaking into public life. The heroes and heroines are often carrying more than one burden at once: family duty, sexual shame, class barriers, violence, grief, or guilt. The sex scenes are intense, but they are also part of the power struggle and the emotional reckoning.

If you want light and frothy, this probably is not the series to start with. If you want a dark Regency world where revenge plots turn into love stories, and where later books care just as much about aftermath as they do about seduction, The Villain is the one to pick up. It is brooding, messy, and surprisingly interested in what comes after survival.