Everyone wants him. No one has ever truly seen him. To New York's elite, Ransom Kade is the billionaire CEO planning the wedding of the season. To the underworld, he is The Widowmaker, the mafia lord no one lives long enough to name. Rumer Voss isn't chasing a headline. She's chasing the man who murdered her pregnant mother and left her nothing but a cold case and a reason to fight. Undercover as a wedding reporter, she watches him lift his glass at his own engagement party. “To Odessa,” he says, and the room goes still. “No, no, no,” her father snaps, his face reddening. “We don't cheer to women — unless she's warming your bed.” “She will be warming my bed,” Ransom answers without blinking — and across the room, Rumer realizes the monster she came to destroy is far more dangerous, and far more magnetic, than any story could have prepared her for. He is supposed to be her revenge. She is supposed to be a loose end he ties off quietly. Instead, the closer she gets to unmasking The Widowmaker, the closer he pulls her into a world where love is just another blade, and the only way out of this marriage is through a truth that could kill them both.

For five years, Beckett Cole's smile was the only spotlight Marlowe Vance ever wanted — even when he used it to make her the school joke. Then a housing mix-up hands her a new roommate: Kellan Ford, Ashcombe Preparatory Academy's ice-cold hockey transfer, who is somehow already asleep in her bed. He is rude. He is unbothered. And he is the only person who has ever noticed when she is drowning. "You didn't have to just stand there and take it, you know," he tells her, after Beckett humiliates her in front of the whole cafeteria. "I know," she whispers. "But I didn't know how not to." Kellan looks at her for a long second. Something in his face changes. "Then I'll teach you." What starts as one boy's blunt lessons in confidence becomes something neither of them planned — while cheer captain Sable Winters decides a girl like Marlowe was never allowed to win. Because Kellan has a plan Marlowe doesn't know about yet. And the boy training her to be wanted has already decided she's his.

Unlimited notifications. That’s all it took to turn me into a stranger’s girlfriend. One night on a park bench with a boy I didn’t recognize, and by morning I was trending under Kingston Ashford’s name — 2.8 million followers deep in a relationship that never happened. I lost my scholarship the same week. I lost my privacy the same night. So when Kingston shows up outside my theatre building offering me the one thing that could fix both, I should have said no. "My father wants me to date you," he says. I stop walking. "Not for real," he adds quickly. "For — it’s complicated. There are these rumors about me that have been hurting my chances with the NHL, and the photograph of us together made them go away overnight, and my father thinks if we keep being seen together it’ll help my recruitment. You’ll be compensated for it heavily, or whatever you want." A fake relationship sounds simple until it’s with the hottest guy at Wrenfield and his father is the one writing the checks. Kingston gets the image his career needs. I get to stay in school. It ends the moment Boston signs him — that was the deal. Nobody warned me what happens when the cameras start catching something real.