Blood of the Bear
They called him the Kingmaker—the man who crowned kings and destroyed them, who held England’s fate in his hands.
History remembers Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick as a warrior and a schemer.
But history never knew the woman who stood in his shadow.
She hid too well.
The woman who gathered his secrets, guarded his life, and loved him when loving him meant losing everything else.
Alice Neville was his spy.
His confidante.
His heart.
For twenty years, through war and victory, triumph and shattering loss, she served him in silence and in secret, in the stolen spaces between what they owed the world and what they owed each other.
From the first battle at St Albans to the last stand at Barnet, Blood of the Bear tells the story history never dared to record: the Kingmaker and the woman who loved him.
A tale of crowns and bloodshed, loyalty and betrayal, and a passion that endured war, marriage, and the fall of dynasties.
Five books.
Twenty years.
One love hidden in plain sight.
The bear may fall, but the heart remembers.
The Kingmaker's spy
England, 1451.
At fourteen, Alice Neville hides behind a tapestry and overhears a secret family council. When she is discovered, she does not cower. She threatens them all with treason.
They could silence her. Instead, they send her to the Countess of Salisbury.
Under the formidable Countess's tutelage, Alice learns to watch, to listen, to lie—to become invisible. She is a weapon forged in shadow, shaped to serve the Neville family's ambitions.
But when she meets Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick—married, powerful, and utterly forbidden—Alice discovers that the greatest danger is not enemy spies or Lancastrian plots.
It is her own treacherous heart.
From the blood-soaked streets of St Albans to the glittering deception of the Burgundian court, Alice walks a knife's edge between duty and desire. She gathers secrets in dockside taverns, infiltrates the Queen's own palace, and risks everything to protect the man she cannot have.
But Richard Neville is no gentle knight from a ballad. He is ruthless, ambitious, and willing to let a town burn if it serves his purpose.
And Alice is willing to let him.
She is the woman history overlooked. This is the story it kept hidden.
Some secrets are worth dying for.
Some loves are worth the fall.
And some fires, once lit, can never be extinguished.
The Kingmaker’s Spy is the first book in a sweeping five-book saga of forbidden love, political intrigue, and devastating passion set against the brutal beauty of the Wars of the Roses—historically grounded, with the silences of history filled by the truths it never recorded.
The Kingmaker's secret
England, 1458.
War is coming and Alice Neville is ready.
No longer a girl hiding behind tapestries, she is the Kingmaker's spy, his confidante, and his secret lover. But when the Yorkist cause collapses and Alice must flee England, everything changes.
To protect their secret, she accepts a marriage of convenience. To survive, she learns to lie to everyone—including herself.
From assassination attempts at Westminster to the blood-soaked snow of Towton, Alice will discover what it truly costs to love Richard Neville.
The affair that began in shadows is about to consume them both.
THE KINGMAKER'S TRIUMPH
(1461–1465) He made a king. Now he learns what kings forget.
She has given him everything. A son he cannot claim. Secrets that could destroy them both.
England, 1461. The Kingmaker is the most powerful man in the realm—but power cannot protect what Richard and Alice have built together. When their child is born, he must bear another man's name. When the women who kept their secret die, only Alice's brother remains to guard the truth.
And then Edward betrays him.
A secret marriage to Elizabeth Woodville. A vast, ambitious family flooding the court. The French alliance Richard spent months negotiating—destroyed in a single announcement.
Alice knows what Richard becomes when he is wounded. She has seen the cold fury, the patience that precedes devastation.
The king Edward chose his queen. Now Richard will choose his revenge.
THE KINGMAKER's WAR
(1465- 1469) The Woodvilles rise, the rift widens, and the man who made Edward begins to unmake him
England, 1465. The Woodvilles are rising—and Richard Neville is done waiting.
Every position he wanted for his allies goes to the queen's family instead. Every slight is deliberate. Every appointment a dagger. Alice watches the man she loves turn his cold fury into something far more dangerous: a plan.
She does what she has always done. She gathers intelligence. She slips between shadows. And when the time comes, she convinces her own husband to ride out under a rebel banner—for a cause she believes in more than he ever will.
In Calais, Richard defies the king's command and binds himself to Edward's resentful brother Clarence. The rebellion that follows is brutal. Woodvilles die. Edward is taken prisoner. And on the battlefield, John Conyers falls.
Alice is free at last.
But Richard makes a fatal choice. He releases Edward, believing he can still control the king he made.
He is wrong. And the reckoning is only beginning.
THE KINGMAKER'S FALL
(1469–1471) An impossible alliance, a fog-shrouded battlefield, and the price of loving a kingmaker.
England, 1470. Richard Neville has run out of allies.
To reclaim what he has lost, he must kneel before his oldest enemy—Margaret of Anjou, the queen Alice once spied upon. He offers the impossible: his daughter as bride to the Lancastrian prince. A restoration. A second chance.
Alice cannot follow him to France. She waits in England, heavy with his twins, gathering intelligence, tracking Edward's movements. When Richard returns in triumph, she dares to believe they might finally have won.
But Clarence betrays them. Edward lands with an army. And Alice refuses to be left behind again.
She has spent twenty years watching Richard ride to war. Twenty years waiting.
Not this time.
On a fog-shrouded field at Barnet, everything Alice has fought for comes down to a single, brutal morning.
Some fires, once lit, can never be extinguished. They can only burn until there is nothing left.
(I already know I'll be crying when I write the last chapter.)