The Empire as Setting

The reason I keep writing dark romance set inside empires — mafia, royal, dynastic — is that the empire gives me the one thing every romance secretly needs: a bigger antagonist than the man in the room.

The villain in a great dark romance is not the hero. The villain is the institution the hero was raised inside. The empire he inherited. The throne he sits on. The vow his grandfather signed in someone else’s blood. The hero is, in the best version of the genre, the most interesting prisoner of the empire — and the love story is what cracks the prison open.

What the empire does for the book

Four things, almost every time:

One. It explains the danger. The hero is dangerous because the empire required him to be. Not because he is constitutionally cruel. This matters. It gives the heroine, and the reader, a place for the danger to go. He is not the villain; he is the most powerful person inside the villain.

Two. It justifies the stakes. The romance is not just two people falling in love. It is two people falling in love against the entire architecture of the world the hero was given. The cost of the love story is not abstract. The cost is, very specifically, the empire.

Three. It creates the locked room. Romance lives in proximity. An empire — a compound, a palace, a crime family — is a locked room by another name. The two characters cannot leave. They can only choose, every morning, how to be together inside the room.

Four. It allows the fall. The empire has to fall. Or it has to be reshaped. Or it has to lose the one piece of itself it cannot survive losing — which is, by the end, the hero’s loyalty. The love story is the thing that takes the piece out. The empire’s collapse is the physical evidence of the love story.

The line I will not cross

The empire is a setting. It is not an excuse. The hero is dangerous because the world made him so, and the genre asks the reader to believe in the world. But the acts on the page are still chosen — by the hero, by the heroine, by me.

I will not write an empire that absolves the man inside it. The empire explains him. It does not excuse him.

The line of dark romance, for me, is exactly there: the man is dangerous, the world made him dangerous, and he is still responsible for the choices he makes inside it. The romance arrives when he chooses, for her, against the empire. Not because he was forced to. Because he wanted to.

That’s the empire. That’s the engine. That’s why I keep writing this kind of book.

Empires fall. Love doesn’t.