Not yet thirty, Bathory has assembled a peculiar résumé: model, sex worker, linguist, Latin scholar, and assassin. The last of these has been the family trade for generations. Growing up, Bathory, her mother, and her father made an isolated, strange, and loving - if very unusual - family unit.

Her lonely childhood games mimicked spycraft and wet-work, while her parents watched and shared their arcane theories about love and death. As a student in New York, her life changes on accepting a job at a dilapidated card shop in Manhattan. This is a front for an agency that allows her to put her inherited skills to use while pursuing romance in the city.

However, steering clear of attachment is as dangerous as anything else she does and means sidestepping a certain alluring figure from her father's past. She is equally intent on dying young, a less difficult proposition given her heritage, the company she keeps - call girls, conflicted cops, trustfund hoodlums - and the people pursuing her. Will Bathory escape both fate and family, or does satisfaction and salvation lie only in their embrace?