She spent two years building a life without him. New city. New title. New armour. A version of herself so polished and so certain that the name Rafael Voss barely registered as a wound anymore. Or so she told herself. Amara Osei has clawed her way to Creative Director at thirty by talent alone — no connections, no safety net, no room for the kind of softness that gets women like her overlooked. She is brilliant. She is untouchable. She has not cried over a man since the night she walked out of an apartment and a relationship and an entire life without looking back. She was not going to look back. Then she walked into the executive floor of Crest Holdings on her first morning and found Rafael Voss sitting at the head of her new boardroom — composed, immaculate, and watching her with grey eyes that have always seen exactly too much — and every wall she has built in the last two years developed a hairline fracture. He is her CEO. He is also the man who broke her. Rafe Voss has spent two years running a company by day and running from the memory of Amara Osei by night. He tells himself he made the right call. He lets her hate him. He tells himself that is fine, that it is what she deserved — to leave, to rebuild, to become the extraordinary woman now standing in his conference room pretending she doesn't feel a thing. He is very good at lying to himself. He is considerably worse at it now that she is forty floors up and sharing his air. They agree on nothing except this: what is between them is professional and nothing more. They shake hands in front of colleagues. They sit at opposite ends of tables. They perform the entire ritual of strangers with devastating commitment. It lasts approximately four days. A broken lift. A work drinks event and a pulled-aside conversation that cracks the foundation of everything Amara thought she knew. A business trip to Singapore, a hotel corridor at midnight, and the kind of fight that only happens between two people who know exactly where the other person keeps their open wounds. A truth that has been waiting two years to be told — and when it finally is, it does not set anyone free. It only makes everything more complicated. Because the woman Amara walked in on was not a mistress. She was a scheme. A calculated, perfectly timed act of sabotage by the woman Rafe had been quietly, legally separated from for eight months — an ex-wife who understood that the most efficient way to destroy something is to make it look like the other person already has. Rafe let Amara believe the lie. Not because he didn't care. Because he cared too much, in exactly the wrong way — because he had already failed to protect her once, and he could not stomach the thought of her staying out of obligation to a man who hadn't been enough. He thought silence was the last kind thing he could give her. He was catastrophically wrong. Now they share a building, a boardroom, and three seconds of eye contact that does more damage than most people's entire relationships. Now Amara must decide what to do with two years of anger that has nowhere left to go. Now Rafe must learn that the bravest thing he has ever done is not let her leave without a fight this time. And somewhere between the almost-kisses and the honest fights and the late nights when the professional distance collapses entirely, two people who were very good at surviving without each other must figure out whether they are brave enough to stop. Hate Me Better is a story about the things we destroy with silence. About the difference between protecting someone and simply failing to love them out loud. About a woman who rebuilt herself from wreckage and must decide whether the man responsible has earned the right to stand in what she built. About the particular, devastating truth that some fires don't go out. They just wait.

I was wearing Vera Wang, walking toward the man I thought was my savior. Instead, the giant screens at our engagement gala didn't show our "Love Story" montage. They showed my fiancé, Thatcher Montgomery, in a graphic, breathless romp with my younger sister, Bianca, in the very bed I’d bought for our new home. The room went silent. Then the laughter started. I didn't cry. I didn't scream. I walked out of the Plaza Hotel and straight into the back of a black Maybach I knew belonged to the devil himself. Killian Blackwood. The man who destroyed my father’s legacy. My family’s greatest enemy. "I need you to ruin them, Killian," I whispered, the rain soaking my white dress. He looked at me with eyes like cold steel and a smirk that promised hell. "I don't do charity, Elowen. You want revenge? You pay with the only thing you have left. You. Every night. Every whim. Total submission until I grow bored of the St. Claire name." I signed my soul away in the back of that car. We aren't lovers. We are a predator and his prey. And tonight, the hunt begins.