Serena Rosenberg was, by all accounts, a terrible, evil, awful human. When her fiancé, Prince Edward, calls off their engagement to marry the Saintess Eleanor, Serena goes to her death, unwillingly, and convinced that if she had had better servants, she would have prevailed.

Serena finds herself reborn and commits to training 6 of the world's deadliest assassins with herself as their leader to live her life the way she deserves.

The Wicked Princess and Her Twelve Eyes: The Legendary Villainess and Her Elite Assassins is written by Daken and illustrated by saino. English translation by piyo (Irene Nakano). Published by Seven Seas. (November 11, 2025)

Erica Friedman
Rating:

Now this is a Villainess book!

I had just been discussing how much I wanted to read a story where the villainess leaned into her villainy, and by gum, this is it. Serena is legitimately a terrible person. Brutal, calculating, brilliant in the worst way, she deserves to die. Serena 2.0 has a plan from the moment she is born and stops at nothing to achieve it. She's totally my type.

To achieve her ends, Serena finds herself broken young orphans and trains them to be a team of assassins. Determined to live this life seeking revenge, Serena uses horrific mental and physical stress to train her squires into a powerful assault team.

Serena has learned some important lessons from her first life. She works on her social skills and, by leading her crack force of squires, is herself accounted as a leader among the nobles. But some things are not different, things she cannot control…and Serena begins to realize that something is amiss in this new life. Something is…missing. And then the story takes a huge turn.

This story begins horribly, and then is funny and horrible, but the ending is exactly the level of schmaltz one might expect. An after-credits ending puts a whole new spin on the story, reminding us again and again to look beyond the polite manners and the scheming and brutality of the people involved. Over and over we are softened up, ready for, expecting, soft emotions, then BAM! We are sucker punched by the plot. It was great.

The combination of casual assumption of power by an amoral and highly self-serving villainess and the deep committed competence of her SEAL-quality squires, and the laugh-out-loud humor of the many disconnects makes The Wicked Princess and Her Twelve Eyes: The Legendary Villainess and Her Elite Assassins one of the best books I read this season.