She hates him. She's hated him since before she can remember, and she doesn't know why, only that the sight of his crown, his voice, his shadow across a room, makes something in her chest curl up and want to scream. Everyone tells her it's just fear, the ordinary fear anyone would carry for a King who's cut a man's tongue out in front of a crowd and smiled while doing it. She believes them, because why wouldn't she. What she doesn't know is that he remembers her laughing at him when they were both children standing in the wreckage of two different, terrible destinies. That he chose her, once, in a way that cost someone else her life. That the hatred she carries so easily wasn't grown in her, it was planted, watered, and left to bloom by someone she trusted, and it was never hers to begin with. Lonely is the Head follows Valima, aristocrat, CEO, unknowing pawn, and King Lafi Olulo, feared monarch, secret romantic, actual disaster of a man, as a stolen memory, a dying empire's terrorism problem, and a curse two hundred years in the making drag them both toward each other whether they want it or not. Somewhere between the palace, the Sava's political knives, and a shrine to a god of war she was never supposed to meet him in, Valima has to decide what's actually hers to hate, and the King has to decide whether being loved is worth what it's already cost. Bring tissues, bring a temper, this book doesn't do easy.