If You Crave Forbidden Love Across Enemy Lines: Read These 5 Books

by Carissa Broadbent

Oraya is human, raised inside a vampire kingdom by the king who should have killed her. Raihn is the rival heir everyone in that kingdom wants dead. The Kejari is a tournament that ends with one survivor — and they enter it as allies. That is the whole trap. Every step closer is a step toward the moment one of them has to finish it. Broadbent lets the alliance become something softer before she lets either of them admit what it costs. It is the most elegant execution of the trope in modern vampire romance, and the ending will make you feel personally attacked.

by Carissa Broadbent

She swore an oath over the ruins of her home. He is the reason there are ruins. There is no misunderstanding to clear up here, no secret identity that softens the math — he did it, she knows he did it, and she is going to kill him. What makes this one devastating is that the hatred is completely earned and the wanting is completely real at the same time. Neither cancels the other out. If you like your enemies-to-lovers with actual enemies in it, this is your book.

by Sarah J. Maas

Everyone told Feyre what Rhysand was. The most feared High Lord in Prythian, the villain of every story she had been handed, the one name that made allies go quiet. And the courts were already sliding toward war before she ever set foot in Velaris. Choosing him means choosing against everything she was told to protect — and being right about it costs her almost as much as being wrong would have. This is the book that made a generation of readers understand the difference between a monster and a reputation.

by Renée Ahdieh

New Orleans, 1872. Céline arrives with a secret and finds a city held together by a truce between two supernatural factions — a truce that exists precisely so that nothing like her and Sébastien can happen. Ahdieh writes desire the way she writes the city: humid, ornate, and faintly dangerous. Sébastien is heir to a court that cannot afford him falling for a mortal girl, and the truce does not bend. It breaks.

by Tracy Wolff

Grace lands at Katmere Academy with no idea she has walked into the middle of a cold war. Vampires, dragons, wolves, witches — factions that tolerate each other only because the alternative is slaughter. Jaxon Vega is the vampire prince nobody is allowed to want, least of all a human girl with no faction to protect her. Loving him doesn't put her in danger from him. It puts her in danger from everyone else, and that distinction is the entire engine of the series.