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Rina Kent on God of Wrath
In their own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why they wrote it
A childhood grief that never leftThe origin of Kent’s career is not a writing ambition but a wound: the death of a fictional character when they were five years old. That early, outsized grief fixed their attention on villains and outcasts for good, and everything they have written since flows from that fixation.
At the tender age of five, I fell hopelessly in love with a villain from an obscure indie film. When he met his untimely end, I sobbed inconsolably, wailing that it simply wasn’t ‘fair.’ From that moment on, I realized that anti-heroes, villains, and society’s outcasts were the characters that fascinated me the most.
Once Kent had established villains as their subject, the question became who stood opposite them. The answer shifted the entire shape of their fiction, turning monster stories into something else entirely.
It began with tales of monsters but soon evolved into stories about the fierce women brave enough to love them.
Kent did not simply want to write these characters; they framed the project as a form of advocacy. The Legacy of Gods series, in which Jeremy Volkov (the son of Royal Elite and Deception Trilogy lead Adrian Volkov) appears as a second-generation protagonist, is the fullest expression of that commitment.
I made it my mission to be their voice and give them the endings they deserve.
Jeremy’s place in the series was planned from the beginning. Kent confirmed in a Goodreads Q&A that every book in Legacy of Gods would feature a main character from the Royal Elite series, with parents appearing in point-of-view chapters as well. The architecture was always generational.
How they wrote it
Characters first, plot in their wakeKent does not build a world and then populate it. The characters arrive first, often long before the story around them is clear, and that sequencing is the reason their books read the way they do.
They actually come hand in hand, but usually, the characters live with me long before the complete plot comes along. That’s part of the reason why I write extremely character-driven books.
When Kent does commit to a plot, they commit completely. During the Royal Elite trilogy, reader speculation about where the story was headed poured into their inbox throughout the writing process, but the destination was already fixed before book one was written.
The three books were already plotted before I wrote the first book and the plot remains unchanged.
The pattern of following a villain’s mind across books into a series of their own appears in Kent’s work more than once. They described exactly this dynamic when explaining how a secondary character in the Royal Elite universe earned his own story. The same logic governs Legacy of Gods, where characters seeded in earlier books return as leads.
I have a soft spot for villains, I guess? When I wrote a chapter for Jonathan in Twisted Kingdom, the final book of Aiden & Elsa’s trilogy, I was fascinated by his mind and knew I needed to spend some more time there.
Writing dark male leads extracts a real emotional cost. Kent named Adrian Volkov, Jeremy’s father, as one of the three characters they connect with most deeply, and described the work of staying with him even during the periods of active dislike.
The darkness gets too much when I personally hate my male characters, but I push through those feelings anyway, because I eventually love them. I hated Adrian sometimes, but I loved him most of the time. He’s one of my top 3 characters that I connect with the most.
Mood, for Kent, is not a precondition for working. The sentence below captures the discipline behind a backlist that spans multiple interconnected series.
I don’t wait for inspiration, I kind of summon it.
What they want us to sit with
Falling for someone you know you shouldn’tKent’s consistent goal across every series is to put readers in conflict with themselves: to make them root for characters whose behavior they would reject anywhere else. That friction is not a side effect of the books; it is the point.
Better known for writing unapologetic anti-heroes and villains, Rina weaves tales of characters you shouldn’t fall for but inevitably do.
The reader response Kent returns to as evidence that the goal was achieved is not a five-star review or a sales figure. It is a single reader who lost track of the boundary between fiction and experience. Kent described hearing about her in a 2019 interview and named the feeling it produced.
She completely forgot that she was reading a book and lived the journey in one sitting and almost cried when she had to go back to reality. That made me feel so fuzzy inside.
Total immersion, not moral comfort, is the experience Kent is after. God of Wrath, as the third book in a series built around heirs of established villains, asks readers to make that surrender again for a character whose darkness has a documented family history.
Kent has confirmed that Legacy of Gods will continue to draw its main characters from the Royal Elite series, which means readers who have followed the earlier books carry emotional history into every new volume. That accumulated attachment is part of what Kent is working with.
Every book will have a main character from RES.