The Poisoner by I.V. Ophelia

Here is a summary with spoilers for The Poisoner by I.V. Ophelia

In Victorian London, Alina Lis, a botanist who runs her late father’s apothecary, enjoys her solitude. Publicly, she is a healer who provides herbal remedies and medicines. Privately, she poisons men she believes are dangerous, immoral, or predatory. Alina uses her extensive knowledge of plants and toxins to carry out these killings discreetly, viewing them as a form of control in a society where women hold little power.

Alina carefully separates her apothecary work from her poisonings, using the shop as both a legitimate business and a cover for her experiments. She operates alone, keeps emotional distance from others, and adheres to a strict personal code regarding who deserves to die.

Alina attends a high-society party hosted by her childhood friend, Phoebe. The party places her among wealthy and influential men she distrusts. During the evening, she observes a powerful man with pale eyes behaving in a predatory manner. Alina chooses not to intervene, prioritizing her own safety. Soon after, Alina targets Silas Forbes, a wealthy and arrogant man she determines fits her criteria. She poisons him successfully, or so she believes. Days later, Silas appears alive in her apothecary. His survival makes it clear that he is not an ordinary man.

Silas, meanwhile, has become very interested in Alina and begins to appear repeatedly, disrupting her routine, though to his dismay, she never notices him. He inserts himself into her life and continues to wreak havoc, but is mostly just intrigued by everything that she does. He cannot wait to play with her again. He finally decides to show up at her house and reveal that he is alive. He does so while she is bathing and disappears before she can even get out.

While Alina is continually looking out for Silas, she does make a new friend, Viktor, who also seemingly wants to court her, according to her friend Phoebe. He tells her to come to the school one day and use the lab equipment for any studies she might need.

Silas then starts to make his presence known even more and puts dead rats all over her house. Alina decides it is time to make her move and poison him back while in his own house. However, Silas has already been stalking her, so he watches her break into his house and prepare everything. Once he sees that Alina is ready, he goes into his home, finds Alina, drinks the poison, and then forces her to drink it instead. After she spits it out and admits she was trying to kill him, Silas wants to play a new game. Alina is to put her hands on the table and not move them, or Silas gets to kill her. Alina plays the game well, so well that she does not even move all night, including peeing herself, which makes Silas angry, and thus, Alina wins the game.

After Alina’s rough night, she decides to go visit her father’s grave and talk to him about a future experiment she wants to do. She is interrupted when a storm comes, and she is forced to run. Even worse, Silas comes for her, and she has to run faster. It seems as if Silas is going to take her virginity, but when Alina pleads for him not to, Silas realizes he cannot and disappears.

Scared of what Silas will do next, Alina calls Viktor and Phoebe over to her home. She can feel Silas watching the whole time, so when the two finally leave, Silas comes in and the two start their games all over again. It is a whole week of catch and release, and by the end of it, they are both exhausted and call it a week, deciding that neither of them will kill the other.

Alina wakes up to a dead body on her front door and believes it to be Silas taking their game a step too far. She stays the night at Phoebe’s, but Silas calls and asks where she is and says it was not him who put the body there. Alina goes to Silas’s house that night with a proposition. They will share blood. She wants to study his, and he gets to feed on hers.

After getting her first sample of Silas’s blood, Alina goes to the university to study it. Viktor is there and shows her how to use the machine. When Alina gets back to her home, she then returns the favor and lets Silas feed on her. Silas comes back the next day because he has become quickly addicted to her blood. He offers to answer any of her questions in return to feed on her again. He reveals that his people are called Vipera and that there are quite a few of them. Alina then decides to take Silas to the school and perform some tests on him there, though they do have to halt for a minute when Viktor shows up. To Alina’s dismay, the two boys have a fight over her, but it is a quick one because Alina starts to have a seizure.

Alina wakes up in her home, and Silas is upset with her because it smells like another man has been around her, so he decides to not leave her alone anymore. He is at her side constantly while she heals. For a week, the two are together while she recovers, but she still cannot seem to get well. She then decides that for a distraction and for some potential help, they can explore each other’s bodies. Silas agrees, but they quickly stop when Silas notices two puncture marks on her back. Someone has been feeding on her in a very brutal way. He wants Alina to pack her bags and go with Phoebe out to the country. While she is packing, Silas starts to think, and he believes that it is a Vipera named Lukas who is doing this, one who likes to toy with him and sucks the blood from the spine.

Out in the countryside, Alina is doing worse, and Silas feels bad that he is forcing her out there. One night, he offers to take her out to a seminar to cheer her up. Viktor is there, which makes Alina happy, but not Silas. While Alina is gone for a minute, the two boys have time to talk. That is when Silas learns that Viktor is studying spines, and he realizes that Viktor is Lukas. He quickly grabs Alina and takes her away once again, but he also decides not to tell her anything about Lukas or Viktor. That night, in the heat of things, they end up sleeping together, and Silas goes a step further and ends up mating with her.

Alina wants to know more about the Vipera and asks to go see the dens, but Silas says no. One night, she sneaks out anyway, and Silas follows her to protect her. What Alina sees scars her. She practically sees a massacre and decides she does not want to see more. She then starts to realize she is having feelings toward Silas, but she still wants to figure out how to poison the Vipera, so she continues her studies, including working with Viktor. One day at the university, she starts to feel weird around Viktor.

Silas, meanwhile, decides to go back to his Vipera family and make a statement. He goes to his father’s party and finds Lukas. He threatens him and tells him to stay away from Alina, or there will be consequences. Lukas does not care one bit and tells Silas he cannot wait to play a game with her.

While Alina is out, she runs into Viktor, who tells her that he was sent by Silas to fetch her. Though she feels odd about it, she follows Viktor, but then he reveals himself as a Vipera. He sinks his teeth into her, and she faints. When she wakes up, he has all sorts of secrets to share, like that Phoebe and Silas are siblings, that he is the one who put the dead body on her door, and that he has been waiting for ages to get his hands on her to play with her. While leaving Alina alone to think on all of this, Phoebe comes in to help her clean up, and the two girls decide to make a plan on how to break out. It involves getting the poison that is in Alina’s purse, the poison that should kill a Vipera. Lukas eventually comes back and tries to break her, whipping her, making her lick his boots, and using other forms of torture. In the middle of their session, Silas walks in and demands to see Lukas without Alina there, and he agrees. Lukas and Silas then have an all-out fight, but the two are evenly matched, and in the end, they both relent. Thus starts a game between all three of them, though poor Alina is stuck between the two.

A tipping point for Alina comes when she wakes up and realizes that both of them fed on her in the night, leaving her very drained. She goes to find them both the next day, having found her spark and anger once again, and yells at them both. She even goes as far as yelling at Silas and telling him that she has had enough. She wants out of the hell that she is in. She is done waiting for him to get her out and says that she is willing to kill herself to escape. She promises that if she lives, she never wants to see Silas again. She can see the hurt in Silas’s eyes, but she does not care one bit.

The next evening, there is a nest party, and Silas decides to make Alina jealous, though she does not feel it one bit. However, she wants to make him jealous and goes straight for Lukas and plays with him for a bit, and it works. After they play, she finds Phoebe and realizes that Phoebe has the poisons. Alina quickly goes to her and slips a vial into her mouth. Soon, Lukas loses his temper and starts to yell at Alina, and she just has to sit and take it. He reveals that he knows she killed her father, and he also starts to undress Alina against her will. She waits, and when her moment comes, she cracks the vial in her mouth, bites Lukas, and pushes the poison into the open wound. She tries to spit all the poison out of her own mouth and then starts running away. As she runs, she watches blood stream out of Lukas’s eyes.

The next day, Alina is on a boat to America, ready to start a new life.