Arabella Rose Hayes has spent three years rebuilding herself from nothing. Since the accident that killed the adoptive parents who chose her when no one else would, she's carried two burdens alone: a dying dream of stability, and her adoptive brother's failing heart. Finding her wealthy biological parents should have been her rescue instead, it only proved that blood doesn't guarantee love. Overlooked in favor of their other daughter and drowning in medical debt she can't outrun, Rose walks into a job interview with nothing left to lose. She doesn't get a job, she gets an offer. Elias Nikolai Blackwood, heir to one of the country's most powerful family empires, has six weeks left to marry or lose everything, his inheritance, his company, and his younger sister's future to a cousin who's already measuring the curtains. He doesn't want love. He wants a wife who won't want anything real from him: no feelings, no complications, no family waiting to make a claim on his fortune when the marriage ends. Rose's file crosses his desk at the right moment, a woman desperate enough to say yes, and alone enough to walk away clean. Six months, a contract, a price high enough to save her brother's life and change hers forever. Rose signs, certain she knows exactly what she's agreed to: an arrangement, nothing more. But living inside Elias Blackwood's world, his cold house, his colder reputation, the family that raised him to feel nothing and expect obedience in return starts to unravel the boundaries neither of them meant to cross. As the lines between performance and truth blur, both Rose and Elias must decide what happens when a marriage built to protect everything they have, starts costing them the one thing the contract never accounted for: each other.