Below is the complete list of Rina Kent’s Empire books in order. For this series, the chronological reading order is the same as the order of publication.
Publication Order of Empire Books
About Empire
Rina Kent’s Empire series is a four-book collection of interconnected dark contemporary romances set among powerful lawyers, wealthy families, and relationships shaped by obsession, resentment, secrecy, and unequal power. Each novel follows a different couple and provides a complete romantic arc, but recurring family connections and professional relationships place the books within the same social world. They also belong to Kent’s wider Rinaverse, where characters from the Royal Elite, Kingdom, Thorns, Deception, and Legacy of Gods books frequently share histories or family ties.
Empire of Desire centers on Gwyneth Shaw and Nathaniel Weaver, her father’s best friend and a man eighteen years older than she is. Gwyneth’s long-standing attraction becomes considerably more complicated when circumstances force them into marriage. Nathaniel is controlled, influential, and determined to resist a relationship he considers inappropriate, while Gwyneth refuses to remain the impulsive young woman he believes he understands. Their age difference and family connection create the visible conflict, but the deeper struggle concerns authority, emotional honesty, and who controls the terms of their marriage.
Empire of Sin follows Anastasia Sokolov and Knox Van Doren after an anonymous encounter unexpectedly becomes a workplace problem. Anastasia begins a new job while concealing important parts of her identity, only to discover that the stranger she left behind is her new boss. Knox’s charm hides a far more calculating personality, and he quickly recognizes that her secrets give him leverage. Their relationship develops through suspicion, professional proximity, and the danger created when attraction threatens the carefully divided life Anastasia has built.
The most openly hostile pairing appears in Empire of Hate. Nicole Adler leaves her former life and crosses the Atlantic hoping for a clean beginning, but her new employer is Daniel Sterling, a man whose adolescence she helped make miserable. Daniel is now wealthy, successful, and positioned to return every humiliation he remembers. Their adult relationship is driven by old wounds, retaliation, reluctant attraction, and the gradual exposure of circumstances neither understood fully when they were younger.
Empire of Lust brings together Kingsley Shaw and Aspen LeBlanc, former teenage lovers whose brief encounter ended with a pregnancy and a child Aspen believed she had lost. Years later, the discovery that their daughter is alive forces them back into each other’s lives. Both carry anger, incomplete information, and reasons to blame the other, turning their reunion into a struggle involving parenthood, grief, desire, and mutual destruction. Their connection also gives the final novel a stronger family dimension than the earlier workplace-centered romances.
The four books share Kent’s preference for alternating viewpoints, confrontational dialogue, possessive heroes, emotionally guarded heroines, and relationships in which attraction develops alongside manipulation or hostility. Legal and corporate settings reinforce the emphasis on control: contracts, employment, reputation, family influence, and professional ambition all become tools characters use against one another.
Because each installment follows a separate couple, the series is less structurally dependent than Kent’s duets and trilogies. The novels can stand alone, but publication order preserves recurring connections and prevents minor details about related characters from appearing before their original context. Read together, they form a compact study of four powerful couples discovering that professional success and social influence offer little protection once desire, memory, and family loyalty become impossible to control.