Jasmine Mas’s Bonds of Hercules (2025) is a dark romance and the second installment in the Villains of Lore series, which is set in a futuristic, dystopian Sparta divided between oppressive Olympian and subjugated Chthonic Houses. The novel follows Alexis, the lost heiress to the House of Hades, who is secretly the mythological hero Hercules. After being trapped in a forced marriage to two powerful and possessive Chthonic heirs, Alexis joins an elite assassin group to reclaim her agency and seek revenge, plunging her into a brutal world of political violence. The novel explores themes including The Relationship Between Power, Fear, and Survival; Nontraditional Expressions of Love and Devotion; and The Blurred Line Between Heroes and Villains.

Mas is a New York Times best-selling author of fantasy romance, also known as “romantasy.” Her work includes the popular Cruel Shifterverse series. Her background includes a degree in ancient Greco-Roman classical studies, which informs the mythological world building in her novels. Bonds of Hercules, like its predecessor, Blood of Hercules, became an instant New York Times bestseller and gained significant popularity on social media platforms such as TikTok. The novel engages with the contemporary literary trend of reimagining Greek myths, recasting the traditionally male hero Hercules as a woman grappling with trauma. Its roots in fanfiction culture are acknowledged in the book’s dedication, aligning it with a subgenre known for exploring morally ambiguous characters, intense power dynamics, and controversial themes of obsession and control.

This guide refers to the 2025 Canary Street Press edition.

Content Warning: The source material and guide feature depictions of graphic violence, death, sexual violence and harassment, child abuse, physical abuse, emotional abuse, sexual content, and substance use.

Plot Summary

Fate, an ancient Spartan with the power of premonition, reads a new prophecy that is unusually obscured. It speaks of a “lost one,” a “chained one,” and a “monstrous one” (1). She realizes that the words are tangled because another Spartan with the rare ability to wield the power of Fate has been born, an event that changes everything.

In the year 2100, Alexis Hert, whose secret name is Hercules, prepares to leave her adoptive parents, Hades and Persephone, on the island of Crete. Sparta is a society divided between the oppressive Olympian faction and the defeated Chthonic faction. Alexis, who is blind in her left eye and deaf in her left ear from childhood abuse, decides to join the Assembly of Death, an elite Chthonic assassin group, to seek revenge against her husbands. Three months prior, Kharon, heir to the House of Artemis, and Augustus, heir to the House of Ares, trapped her in a marriage to fulfill a Spartan law and amplify their powers through a marriage bond.

Hades teleports with Alexis to an Assembly of Death outpost in Siberia for her induction alongside Kharon, Augustus, Patroclus (“Patro”), Achilles, and other Spartans. Artemis, Kharon’s mother, announces the induction trial: a 25-mile hunt through the woods where capture means death. Alexis is injured in the hunt. Achilles and Patro try to persuade Alexis to join them, creating a tense standoff with her husbands. To escape, Alexis leaps to Montana, followed by her husbands. They argue about whether their bond is truly romantic or purely physical. Despite her severe injuries, Alexis leaps away again and lands alone in an unknown location, where she loses consciousness.

A day later, Augustus learns from Hades and his father, Ares, that Hades supposedly found Alexis unconscious in the dungeon beneath his palace on Crete. Augustus begins to experience migraines and bleeding from his eyes, a side effect of his strengthening powers. An emergency alarm sounds, announcing that Medusa, Kharon’s sister and a Gorgon with the power of Fate, has escaped from the Underworld. Due to the threat, Artemis orders all Assembly members to stay at Augustus’s villa in Lake Como.

At the villa, Augustus brings Alexis’s adopted brother, Charlie, to be tutored with his sister, Helen. That night, Alexis discovers a prisoner, Ceres, in the villa’s dungeon. Believing her to be the muse who betrayed her during a past trial, Alexis decides to free her. Helen helps, but they are caught by Augustus and Kharon. After Patro, who can detect lies, interrogates the amnesiac Ceres, they agree to let her stay under guard. She recalls only the name “Zeus.” Alexis later finds a note in one of her books linking Zeus to a potential assassination. During a week of training, Kharon reveals his obsessive thoughts about Alexis, and he and Augustus disclose their dominant sexual preferences. Meanwhile, Achilles promises to help Patro claim Alexis for themselves. If Patro and Achilles are forced to marry someone else, according to Spartan laws, they worry that their relationship will be interfered with or their power lessened.

On the day of their first mission to hunt monsters called Titans, Persephone visits Alexis and explains their shared, unique heritage. Artemis assigns Alexis, Achilles, and Patro to a Titan sighting in Rome. There, the men reveal their plan to help her break her marriage bond by nearly killing her husbands, hoping that she will then marry them. The mission goes awry when two mutated, winged Titans appear. Patro is gravely injured, and Achilles abandons Alexis to save him.

Alexis defeats the Titans alone to protect a group of human civilians. She is brutally wounded, losing her ear, but discovers that she can solidify her blood into a weapon. Augustus and Kharon arrive; Kharon cuts off his own ear and sews it onto Alexis’s head. At a safe house, the husbands reaffirm their commitment to protect her. Three days later, after a healing coma and a sexual encounter, Alexis reveals that her left ear was already deaf, making Kharon’s sacrifice medically useless. Upon returning to the villa, Alexis discovers that they share a “pain bond,” allowing them to feel each other’s physical pain.

Weeks later, her husbands gift her a custom graphing calculator to show their affection; it’s a rare piece of technology that Kharon also has a recorder built into to act as Alexis’s diary. The Chthonics then attend the “initiation massacre” at the Dolomites coliseum, where they will participate in violent trials to gain honor. Zeus manipulates a dice roll, assigning Alexis the hardest trials for the upcoming Spartan Gladiator Competition (SGC). He then announces that all Chthonics will be imprisoned and interrogated about Medusa’s whereabouts. In their shared quarters during the SGC, Alexis and her husbands reconcile and eventually consummate their relationship.

The SGC begins with several Spartans easily defeating their trials. Achilles reveals his true power as a dragon who breathes Greek fire. Kharon wins but is severely burned, which Alexis and Augustus feel through the pain bond. Kharon is then captured and tortured by Zeus for information on Medusa. To spare Alexis from feeling his pain, Augustus unleashes his full mental compulsion power, killing his opponents instantly. Meanwhile, hints from Ceres contribute to Alexis’s growing suspicion that Zeus was involved in her abduction and attempted murder as a baby, which left her abandoned in the foster system in Montana, unaware of her true identity.

Alexis faces her brutal trials, during which her animal protector Fluffy Jr. fully transforms into a Pegasus-dog hybrid. Alexis discovers that she can heal with her blood, forming it into the legendary Rod of Asclepius. In the second round, she defeats the two winged Titans. Her final trial is to defeat Augustus and Kharon. Refusing to fight them, she is forced by Augustus’s new mind-projection power to stab him, making him take the loss and the brand of dishonor for her.

Immediately afterward, Alexis is taken for interrogation. She accuses Zeus of being behind her attempted assassination, which he confirms, but he implies that there’s more to the conspiracy. Using her calculator, Alexis secretly records his confession. She then leaps to the symposium and plays the recording for all of Sparta, exposing Zeus’s plot to have her murdered as a child and his framing of Medusa. Zeus flees in disgrace, and Fate proclaims a prophecy fulfilled. Patro then discovers that Ceres is actually Medusa, which Alexis has known all along, allowing the Spartans to be tortured for her. Alexis explains how, a month prior after the Siberian hunt, she accidentally leaped to the Underworld, where she freed the tortured Medusa with Hades’s help. Back at the villa, she killed the real, traitorous Ceres and orchestrated a switch, disguising Medusa as the muse.

At a new federation meeting, Medusa is pardoned but must attend Rhodes Olympian University with Achilles and Patro as her bodyguards. Fearing them, she persuades Alexis to enroll with her. The next day, Alexis tells her husbands the full story of her abusive childhood, and they bring her former foster father to her to be killed. The full prophecy is revealed, describing the roles of Alexis and Medusa in future books.