Overview

"I am interested. I am clean, quiet, and I will not eat the food in the refrigerator."

Three sentences. No punctuation. No small talk. No explanation of why a four-hundred-and-twenty-seven-year-old vampire is applying to share a two-bedroom apartment with a werewolf she's never met.

Rook Vásquez doesn't have time to question it. She's running six delivery shifts a week on a cargo bike through a city that costs more every morning, covering rent for a brother who won't ask for help and a building full of neighbors one notice away from displacement. When her landlord raises the rent by three hundred dollars a month - sixty days' notice, non-negotiable - the math stops working entirely. She needs a roommate. Preferably one who won't bother her.

Corvin Molnár has survived four centuries of war, financial ruin, betrayal, and the specific exhaustion of being the most competent person in every room she's occupied for longer than most civilizations have existed. She's survived BloodCoin, the supernatural investment scheme that wiped out her portfolio and left her in a four-hundred-square-foot studio with eleven weeks of runway and a locked folder she refuses to open. She has a plan. The plan requires a roommate and absolutely nothing else.

What follows is a collaboration agreement, two signatures, and a crossed-out termination clause.

It is also, considerably more slowly and with significantly more spreadsheets, something else entirely.

When Rook starts digging into the ownership structure behind her building's rent increases, she finds threads connecting her landlord to Corvin's past - and to a pattern of displacement that reaches across the city and into the supernatural financial sector Corvin knows better than anyone. What starts as a housing crisis becomes an investigation. What starts as a practical arrangement becomes something neither of them has terminology for, which is inconvenient when you're the kind of person who prefers things properly defined.

We Eat the Rich Last is a slow-burn supernatural romance set in a city where the real monsters own the real estate, and the most dangerous thing two guarded women can do is let someone matter.