God of Malice

God of Malice, a 2022 novel by best-selling novelist Rina Kent, is the first book in the Legacy of Gods series. A dark romance about power, control, and secrets, God of Malice centers on Glyndon King, an art student struggling with dark fantasies, who falls in love with Killian Carson, a potentially dangerous man who is a medical student at another university. As Glyndon learns about the secret societies at war within the two universities that she and Killian attend, she must determine whether she wants to give him total control of herself. The novel uses many classic tropes of dark romance to explore themes relating to love, power, and truth.

This study guide refers to the 2022 Kindle edition.

Content Warning: The source text and this guide features discussions of sexual violence and harassment, rape, ableism, mental illness, death by suicide, suicidal ideation and self-harm, animal cruelty and death, substance use, addiction, graphic violence, sexual content, cursing, illness and death, physical abuse, and emotional abuse.

Plot Summary

Glyndon King is struggling with her own mortality as she visits the cliffs where her friend Devlin died by suicide a few weeks earlier. She wonders if she too should step off the cliff when she slips, and a man she hadn’t noticed catches her. However, instead of immediately pulling her up, he lets her dangle over the cliff until Glyndon agrees to offer him anything he wants. In exchange for saving her life, he forces Glyndon to perform oral sex on him.

Feeling violated and confused, Glyndon returns home. Rather than reporting the man to the police, she uses painting as her emotional outlet. She comes from a family of famous artists, though she feels she isn’t nearly as talented or as sure of herself as the others in her family, and she rarely shows them the dark and emotional paintings she creates. Glyndon continues to think about the assault as she returns to her college campus, often feeling as if she’s being watched. She attends the prestigious Royal Elite University (REU), which is on a secluded island that also houses the elite yet notorious King’s University. The students of the two colleges often feud with one another, and underground secret societies with connections to the Russian mafia promote crime and violence on each campus.

One of the King’s U secret societies is called the Heathens, and Glyndon learns about the club’s secretive and violent initiations through a friend who happens to be their leader’s sister. This is how she also learns about a 19-year-old medical student and founding member of the Heathens named Killian Carson, who turns out to be the man who assaulted her on the cliffs. Though others warn Glyndon about Killian and how he hides his true nature behind a reputable facade, he stalks her and continually catches her alone, exerting his power over her.

Killian is unsure why he’s interested in Glyndon. Whenever he’s around her, the homicidal tendencies that have plagued him since he was a child subside. Though he’s well-regarded and admired by many on the island, Killian often commits smaller acts of cruelty and violence to lessen his desire to kill, and some suggest that he has antisocial personality disorder. Members of his family fear what he’s capable of, but he hasn’t murdered a human being and believes he has enough self-control to stop himself from doing so.

Killian often forces Glyndon into sexual acts to exert his dominance over her. Though she tries to resist him, she also begins to realize that she wants him to take control and be violent with her. Glyndon initially identifies this feeling as a misattribution of arousal due to her response to fear but has secretly fantasized about having control taken from her. While Glyndon’s consent is dubious or coerced throughout much of the novel, Killian never loosens his grip on her, claiming her as his own even when she blatantly rejects him.

After Killian forcibly “takes” Glyndon’s virginity, something he has sought since he discovered she was a virgin, she thinks he’ll grow bored of her, but he continues to pursue her. She fears that she may be falling for him, despite the warnings from others about what he could do to her. Meanwhile, she receives mysterious texts from an unknown number, all seeming to allude to her friend Devlin’s death. She learns that Devlin was nearly initiated into the Heathens just before his death by suicide, and Glyndon resolves to figure out how the secret club connects to his death.

Despite Glyndon’s conflicting feelings, Killian decides to stake his claim on her and make their relationship public. This upsets her older brother, Landon, the head of REU’s secret society, the Elites. The two clubs feud, and Landon nearly kills Killian before Glyndon stops him. She starts to fear more for her safety and her emotional well-being when she recognizes that she loves Killian, though she’s unsure if he even has the capacity to love her back. Just as she’s starting to reconcile herself to this and to being in love with a man who has the desire to kill, Glyndon learns that Killian was directly involved in the initiation that led to Devlin’s death.

Glyndon escapes from Killian by threatening suicide, and she goes to the cliffs where Devlin died to mourn him. She’s shocked when she hears Devlin’s familiar voice and turns around to see that her former friend is in fact alive. Devlin readily admits that he was lying to Glyndon and manipulating her. He was secretly a leader of another King’s U secret society, the Serpents, who hate both the Heathens and the Elites. Devlin initially wanted Glyndon to die with him, and he planted information about her to get Killian interested in her in the first place. This would have led the Heathens and the Elites—particularly Landon and Killian—to blame one another for Glyndon’s death, sparked the war and chaos that Devlin craves, and helped him gain power in the mafia.

Devlin beats Glyndon and leaves her bloodied for Killian and Landon to find, with a message from the Serpents. Rather than turning against each other, however, Landon and the Heathens team up to raid the Serpents’ headquarters. Despite wanting to kill Devlin, Killian knows that doing so would make Glyndon feel guilty; therefore, he and Landon keep Devlin alive to torture him. Glyndon recovers and admits that she belongs to Killian, something she refused to say earlier in the novel because she believed it would lead her to surrender her last shred of autonomy. A battle ensues between the three clubs at the universities, and two years later Glyndon and Killian get engaged.