The Last Assassin - Stephen Cooper

The night his father died, Victor should have died too.

His father kept the secret for years - kept it so well that when the village burned and the darkness came for them, Victor didn't understand why they were running. Only that they were. Only that his father turned east so they could go west. Only that he never came back.

The Nightshade clan was supposed to be erased. A bloodline of assassins so thoroughly buried that only the hunters remained - and a name that someone powerful wanted to stop existing forever.

Victor is the last living piece of it. And that makes him more valuable dead than alive.

Taken in by his aunt Mel - a ruthless, uncompromising clan leader with no patience for sentiment and no tolerance for weakness - Victor is thrown into brutal training where the wrong move doesn't just hurt you. It kills the person beside you. Bound to a partner who wants nothing to do with him. Hunted by an enemy who seems to know every move before he makes it. And never far from the knowledge that his sister Sasha is still out there - held, moved, used as bait - while he bleeds in training yards and learns what it costs to become useful.

Victor isn't just fighting to survive.
He's fighting to become something dangerous enough to matter.

Because they don't just want him dead.
They want the last assassin erased.

What follows is not a story about discovering power. It's a story about surviving long enough to aim it.

The Last Assassin is the first book in an ongoing dark fantasy series - for fans of brutal training arcs, morally complex mentors, and found-family dynamics forged in blood.