Below is the complete list of Rina Kent’s Villain books in order. For this series, the chronological reading order is the same as the order of publication.
Publication Order of Villain Books
About Villain
Rina Kent’s Villain series is a dark male-male romance spin-off from the Legacy of Gods world, following dangerous men whose carefully controlled public identities conceal obsession, violence, and desires their families or social circles may not accept. Each novel centers on a different couple and completes its principal romance, but the characters belong to the same interconnected network of wealthy dynasties and criminal organizations. Familiar names, friendships, rivalries, and inherited loyalties continue across the books, giving the series greater weight when approached in sequence.
Kiss the Villain begins with Gareth Carson, a gifted law student and heir who appears to be the disciplined golden child of a powerful family. That image conceals darker impulses he rarely allows anyone to see. One reckless encounter brings him into conflict with Kayden Lockwood, a dangerous older man who later reappears as Gareth’s criminal-law professor. Neither can expose the other without revealing secrets of his own, turning their relationship into a struggle over leverage, humiliation, retaliation, and control.
The professor-student dynamic creates an immediate imbalance, but Gareth is not written as a passive figure trapped beneath Kayden’s authority. He is intelligent, calculating, and determined to reverse every advantage used against him. Their attraction develops through escalating psychological warfare between two men who are more alike than either initially wants to admit. The romance fits Kent’s established interest in characters who recognize something familiar in another person’s darkness and respond not by retreating, but by moving closer.
Hunt the Villain shifts attention to Vaughn Morozov and Yulian Dimitriev, heirs to rival mafia organizations whose worlds impose strict expectations concerning loyalty, masculinity, and succession. Vaughn is controlled, strategic, and contemptuous of Yulian’s reckless appetite for violence. Yulian appears chaotic and impossible to manage, treating danger with a lack of restraint that unsettles someone accustomed to calculating every move.
Forced proximity allows their hostility to deepen into an attraction neither man can safely acknowledge. Their conflict is shaped not only by personal rivalry but by the criminal families they are expected to represent. A relationship between them threatens alliances, reputations, and their positions within organizations where vulnerability can be used as a weapon. The novel consequently gives its romance a different pressure from Gareth and Kayden’s intellectual contest: Vaughn and Yulian must decide whether loyalty to inherited power is worth surrendering the one person capable of seeing beneath their defensive performances.
The announced third installment, Crave the Villain, centers on Cyrus and Eduard, also identified as Jethro. It continues the series’ male-male focus and is scheduled to follow the first two romances rather than extend either earlier couple into a multi-book arc. Because its full premise has not yet been publicly revealed, the established information is deliberately limited, but the book remains part of the same connected world and is intended to complete the current three-book sequence.
The novels can function as standalones because every volume introduces a new central relationship. Publication order nevertheless provides the clearest development of the surrounding families and prevents appearances by established characters from losing their context. Reading Legacy of Gods first is not essential, although it adds history to the names, alliances, and parental legacies shaping the younger men.
What distinguishes Villain from Kent’s earlier mixed-couple series is its sustained attention to queer relationships inside environments governed by rigid family expectations and inherited power. Its protagonists are not seeking escape from darkness so much as someone capable of surviving it beside them. Love becomes another dangerous allegiance—one that can expose every weakness they were raised to conceal.