In a crumbling house on the wrong side of town, eighteen year old Jack survives on charm, muscle, and lies. At school he is the tall, cocky tease who can make anyone laugh. At home he skips meals, counts coins, and tries not to hear his brother’s girlfriend hissing that he is just another mouth to feed. His parents are dead, the bills keep coming, and Jack’s one escape is the recurring dream of a boy he has never met.

The dream boy plays guitar beneath foreign constellations, long blond hair falling over freckled cheeks, big brown eyes lost in music that Jack can still hear when he wakes. The boy is beautiful, untouchable, and entirely unreal. Until Jack discovers that he is not a dream at all.

Felix is an elf from another dimension, the last surviving heir of a fallen royal family, and a living weapon owned by the man who destroyed his world. At nineteen, the usurper king keeps Felix alive as his favorite assassin and his favorite toy. Court whispers call Felix a traitor and a pet. The police call him their lost prince. The king calls him whenever a mission fails or his friends grow bored.

Felix calls none of it by its name.

He lives alone in a tree bungalow deep in an enchanted forest, pretending it is a home and not a gilded cage. His days are filled with missions, blood, and the careful management of his own defiance. His nights are sometimes filled with music when he dares to remember who he used to be. When Jack and a close knit group of friends discover a way to enter Felix’s dimension through shared dreams, Jack finally steps through the boundary that has separated them.

The other world is breathtaking. Planets wheel close enough to touch, strange creatures move through bright forests, and raw magic hums in the air like an endless chord. It is also fragile. Human presence disrupts the balance that holds it together, and the cracks in its power begin to show the moment Jack arrives.

Jack, Leo, Maya, Quinn, and Ester are quickly stranded there, with no path back to their own reality. They end up sharing Felix’s secluded bungalow, forced into an uneasy new life that is equal parts wonder and danger. Jack has finally found the boy from his dreams, but Felix is nothing like the gentle figure he imagined.

This Felix is small and lethal, all sharp words and watchful eyes. He is stunning and he knows it, bratty and quick to anger, confident on the surface and deeply guarded underneath. To Jack he is a walking contradiction: a royal assassin who hums lullabies under his breath, a survivor who still cares for strangers, a hostile stranger who haunts Jack’s every thought.

Jack tries to win him over the only way he knows how, with teasing jokes and constant attention. His flirting is relentless, his obsession obvious to everyone but Felix. He does not understand why his usual light touches and easy compliments make Felix tense instead of flustered. He does not know that the way he leans in feels too much like another man Felix cannot refuse.

Felix, for his part, wants to hate him.

He resents the human who walked into his world and disrupted its fragile magic. He resents the way Jack looks at him like he is something bright instead of something ruined. Most of all, he resents the way his heart races when Jack’s hand brushes his, the way warmth creeps into his chest when Jack jokes just to see him smile.

Their relationship becomes a tangle of misread signals and unspoken wounds. Jack mistakes Felix’s silence for indifference and his flare ups of anger for hatred. Felix mistakes Jack’s protectiveness for pity and his persistence for the first step toward possession. They argue often, push each other away, and pull each other back again without quite understanding why.

Around them, the dimension begins to buckle.

The presence of a human twists currents of power that have flowed unchanged for centuries. Spells falter. Old creatures stir. Corruption at the heart of the kingdom spreads faster. The usurper king, already paranoid and cruel, learns that there is a human in his realm and begins to hunt.

Felix is pulled in two directions at once. The police and remnants of loyal factions whisper that he should claim his blood right and challenge the king. The king tightens his grip and calls Felix to court more often, for missions and for entertainment. Each time Felix returns to the tree bungalow late, bruised and distant, Jack feels the shape of something terrible without knowing its full truth.

Behind the closed doors of the palace, the abuse Felix endures is brutal, degrading, and relentless. Sometimes it is a short, sharp punishment when a mission falters. Sometimes it is a long ordeal when the king and his circle want to remind their pet exactly what he is. Felix survives through defiance, sarcasm, and the belief that no one else can ever be allowed to carry his shame.

He never tells Jack.

As weeks turn into months, life in the bungalow builds itself from small, stolen ordinary moments. Shared meals cooked over a flickering stove. Arguments about chores and training schedules. Whispered conversations under branches heavy with glowing fruit. Jack and Felix circle each other, clashing and colliding, learning the edges of each other’s pain without naming it.

Jack’s friends carve out their own roles: Leo with practical support, Maya with fierce protectiveness, Quinn with quiet analysis, Ester with unexpected tenderness toward Felix. Together they become a strange sort of found family, anchored around a boy who still believes he does not deserve a home.

Felix’s mental state, once a tight coil of survival instinct and numbness, begins to shift. He is still called to the palace, still used and hurt, still bearing secrets that eat at him. Yet between each ordeal he returns to laughter, to bickering over trivial things, to Jack’s relentless presence, and finds himself healing despite the fact that the abuse has not stopped. He hates that he can feel both broken and content, both terrified and happy.

Jack falls in love with all of it.

He falls in love with Felix’s temper and with the way his face softens when he thinks no one is looking. He falls in love with the little bubble of safety they build in that tree house. He falls in love with a future he has never allowed himself to imagine, where he is not just the poor kid from a dead end street but someone who belongs, someone who protects, someone who is chosen.

Felix falls in love despite himself, and it scares him more than any mission.

On the night before everything shatters, the two of them lie beneath strange stars on a high branch outside the bungalow. The world feels briefly far away: no king, no missions, no hunger, no unpaid bills. Just the soft rustle of leaves, the faint hum of distant magic, and the boy from Jack’s dreams within arm’s reach.

The kiss that follows is soft and hesitant. Felix freezes for a heartbeat, his body remembering too many hands that did not care if he tensed or trembled. Jack feels it instantly, pulls back enough to search his eyes, and quietly checks on him. There is no pressure, no demand. Just a gentle hand and a simple assurance that they can stop at any time.

Felix chooses not to stop.

He leans back in, and the kiss deepens into something fragile and new. It never goes further than mouths and arms twined together. Jack holds him with a care that makes Felix’s chest ache. For the first time, Felix experiences intimacy that is not about ownership or control, and the conflict inside him grows even sharper.

In the morning, the king and his retinue come to collect what he believes is his.

Felix’s delay in answering their summons has not gone unnoticed. They arrive at the secluded bungalow while Felix is alone, and the punishment that follows is a brutal reminder of the power he stands against. When Jack and the others return from a harmless trip to the market, laden with small treats and stories, they step into a nightmare.

They freeze.

The scene before them destroys every illusion Jack has carefully maintained about Felix’s life. In a heartbeat he understands why Felix flinched, why he vanished without explanation, why some nights he returned hollow eyed and silent. The word for what is happening is finally spoken aloud. Rape. Abuse. Ownership. Jack’s mind fills with horror, fury, and helpless guilt.

There is no glorious last stand, no sudden victory. The king’s power is overwhelming, the magic of the realm unstable, and Jack’s group far outmatched. Panic and shock hold them in place for a heartbeat too long. In that heartbeat they recognize the danger, and Felix recognizes his one, terrible chance.

Using the last of his royal magic, Felix tears open a portal between worlds.

It is messy, unstable, and doomed from the start. He knows this. He knows that the gate will not hold long enough for them all to pass. He knows that his magic has been drained and twisted by years of service, that his body is already paying the price. He knows he will be left behind.

He chooses to do it anyway.

Jack and his friends run. Felix urges them on, torn between wanting them safe and wanting Jack to stay within arm’s reach. The gap between dimensions shrieks and shudders. Magic buckles. Reality stretches thin. They race toward an exit that exists only because Felix has decided that their lives matter more than his own body, his own throne, his own desperate need not to be alone again.

At the last moment Jack turns back.

He reaches for Felix, eyes wide with a new, unbearable understanding. Jack is screaming his name, sobbing, begging him to hurry. Felix is already being pulled backward by the king’s guards, rough hands closing on his arms. The portal flickers and begins to close. Felix meets Jack’s eyes and, in a final act of defiant tenderness, smiles.

The gate seals between them.

Jack collapses into his own world with the sound of that smile burned into his memory. There is no immediate aftermath, no healing montage, no glimpse of what comes next. The story ends on the image of a boy left on the wrong side of a dying world, smiling through terror as he is dragged back into the nightmare he tried to spare someone else from.

Through Broken Stars is a dark romantic fantasy about obsession, survival, and the way love can grow in even the most poisoned soil. It follows two boys bound by dreams and divided by cruelty, charting their path from hostility and misunderstanding to a love so fierce it becomes its own form of self destruction.

The narrative alternates between Jack and Felix once they share a world, giving readers a close look at their clashing perceptions. Jack’s chapters spill over with longing and stubborn hope, while Felix’s blend bitter cynicism with flashes of aching softness. Their miscommunications fuel much of the tension, as each fails to see the depth of the other’s feelings until it is almost too late.

The book does not shy away from the brutal realities of Felix’s exploitation. Short, intense scenes of assault are woven through the story, always framed as the horrific crimes they are, always leaving Felix altered and in pain. Longer sequences appear sparingly but carry heavy emotional and physical impact. The focus remains on the psychological toll, the secrecy, and the impossible choices he must make to protect the people he has come to love.

At the same time, the story spends generous time on small, human moments: the shared laughter in a cramped kitchen in the sky, the quiet companionship of two boys watching alien constellations, the warmth of a found family trying to build something gentle inside a violent world. These scenes make the final tragedy cut deeper, because readers have seen exactly what is being lost.

Through Broken Stars ends without comfort, redemption, or reunion. It is the first half of a love story interrupted by power and circumstance, a portrait of a boy who gave everything he had for someone who finally saw him, and another boy who will have to live with the knowledge that love was not enough to save the person who saved him.

It is a book for readers who want their fantasy laced with raw emotion, their romance slow and messy, and their endings honest to the point of heartbreak.