I HAte U The Ballad of Roman

About the Book

New Orleans, 1920s.
Before the Series Begins.

Roman Vale commands the Velvet Mercy supper club with a voice built for confession and a smile built for escape. Charming, calculating, and deeply in debt, Roman accepts a dangerous assignment from the corrupt Lucien Harrow — seduce Bella Devereaux and steal the Devereaux Book of Names, a record preserving the deeds, marriages, and inheritances Harrow's family spent decades erasing from Black families across New Orleans.

What Roman doesn't expect is Bella. She receives him in a candlelit music room — and calmly reveals the exact amount Harrow promised him. The seduction has already failed before it begins. But rather than expose him, Bella offers a counterproposal: pose as her fiancé aboard Harrow's private Crescent Limited and help recover the stolen evidence.

Their arrangement is sealed before Mama Corinne with four rules, nine knots, and the weight of two full names. What begins as strategy — and what lives beneath it — is something neither of them has a word for yet.

Set against the atmospheric backdrop of 1920s New Orleans — jazz, hoodoo, river fog, and the hunger of old money — The Ballad of Roman is a prequel that answers the one question every viewer of I HAte U will eventually ask: Who was Roman before he became the man who keeps appearing at the wrong moment?

A love born of deception. A promise sealed in blood. A life chosen forever.