Serena Crystal

There is no price for which a good man sells his daughter."The night Aria Bennett's father knocks on her door at eleven o'clock, she doesn't know she's being sold. She only knows that something is wrong – the rain, the late hour, the stranger waiting in the study downstairs.Dominic Hargrove is not a businessman. He is a kingpin. A killer. A man who has spent fifteen years building walls around a heart shattered by his first wife's mysterious death. When RaymondBennett comes to him with a debt he cannot pay, Dominic sees an opportunity – not just for expansion, but for something he has denied himself for years.A wife he doesn't have to love. A marriage he doesn't have to feel.The contract is simple: two years. A credible performance. No feelings.But Aria Bennett is not a woman who performs. She is a woman who survived her mother's slow, suspicious death. She is a woman who reads books and writesin notebooks and refuses to be impressed by things that impress everyone else. And when she looks at Dominic Hargrov – really looks – she sees past the locked doors and the dark suits to the man beneath.The man who is watching her. The man who chose her. The man who will burn the world down to keep her.As Nicolai – a rival kingpin with a fifteen-year grudge – closes in, as secrets about Aria's mother begin to surface, as the line between performance and reality dissolves, they will both learn the truth:Some contracts are made to be broken. Some loves are worth dying for.And in a world of locked doors and bloodied hands, the most dangerous thing of all is not the enemy at the gate – but the wife who refuses to be owned.