“I can still taste you, and I’m not wasting another second without kissing you again. Shut up and get over here.” **** Octavia Butler has been called a mistake for as long as she can remember—an illegitimate daughter born from a mistress, a label that followed her like a curse. When her mother’s gambling debts spiral out of control, debt collectors close in with nowhere left to kill or be killed With no options and no one coming to save her, Octavia is forced into a dangerous contract: seduce and ultimately eliminate one of the most feared men in the business world. Noah Zhang. The “Mad Prince” of the Zhang Group. Second heir to a powerful empire. A man known for his ruthless temper, icy control, and open disgust for women who dare get too close. He was supposed to be a target. And Noah Zhang has never been a man easy to deceive… or resist. Now she’s trapped between her mission and something far more lethal than fear—desire. Can Octavia break the wall around Noah’s heart… or does she get caught before she ever gets the chance to kill him?

Kim Sok-joo has never been anyone's first choice. Not his family's. Not his teachers'. Not the world's. From the time he was old enough to understand that some children are claimed and some are tolerated he understood which category he fell into. He was the quiet one. The one people looked past. The black sheep of a family that had never known what to do with him and had eventually stopped trying. The only person who ever loved him without condition was his grandmother. A small fierce woman who showed love the way practical people show love — through presence, through provision, through staying even when staying was difficult. She had Alzheimer's and some days she forgot his name and some days she forgot his face and on those days Kim would sit beside her and hold her hand and be whoever she needed him to be because she had done the same for him his whole life. She was the only home he had ever known. The other thing that kept him alive — especially during the years when alive was not a given — was music. Specifically the music of Rider. Specifically the voice of the group's leader, a man named Charlie whose songs had a specific quality of understanding in them that felt, in the dark hours, like someone had written them directly for Kim's particular brand of loneliness. Kim never imagined he would meet him. He certainly never imagined he would manage him. But life has a specific cruelty for people who have survived too much — it gives them something extraordinary just before it takes it away. Kim gets the job managing Rider and it is nothing like he imagined. The members don't trust him. The company views him as a liability. The idol world, which had seemed from the outside like a place of glamour and music and belonging, turns out to be a machinery of image and pressure and politics that Kim is entirely unequipped to navigate. And Charlie is — complicated. Not the voice from the headphones. Not the performer on the stage. A real person with real exhaustion and real weight and a younger brother named Junhoo who is the black sheep of his family in the way that Kim is the black sheep of his — gay in a family that cannot accept it, labeled a problem before he ever had the chance to be anything else. Charlie has been protecting Junhoo his entire life. It is the organizing principle of his existence. Whatever else he is or is not, whatever else he has or hasn't managed, he has always been the person standing between Junhoo and the worst of what the family would do if left unchecked. So when the family finds out that Junhoo has been seeing someone — and when the person they believe Junhoo has been seeing turns out to be Kim — Charlie does what Charlie always does. He finds a solution. He goes to Kim and he says — I need you to pretend to be my boyfriend. Just long enough to redirect the family's attention. Just long enough to give Junhoo some breathing room. Nobody gets hurt. Nobody loses anything. We pretend for a while and then we stop. Kim says yes. He says yes for reasons he cannot entirely explain to himself. Because Charlie is the idol whose music kept him alive and being asked for anything by that person is disorienting. Because Kim has never been asked for anything that wasn't a transaction and at least this transaction is honest about what it is. Because he has nothing to lose and nowhere better to be and because some part of him — the part that has been invisible his whole life — responds to being chosen even for pretending. He says yes. He does not know what he is saying yes to. What he does not know is that Junhoo has been quietly in love with him for longer than either of them realizes. Not aggressively. Not presumptuously. The specific careful love of a person who knows their feelings are not guaranteed to be welcome and has chosen, out of genuine care for the object of those feelings, to keep them contained. Junhoo stayed away from Kim deliberately. He suppressed what he felt specifically because he did not want Kim to feel uncomfortable or pursued or unsafe. He kept it hidden. Right up until the moment he found out that his brother and his crush were together. The family believed it immediately — Charlie was known to be straight. Kim was convincing in the role. The pressure on Junhoo eased. Everything worked exactly the way Charlie designed it to work. Except that Junhoo was watching. Every day he was watching. Watching Kim laugh at something Charlie said. Watching them move through spaces together with the specific ease of people who are learning each other. Watching the fake boyfriend become something that looked increasingly less fake with every week that passed. He kept the rage hidden. He kept it hidden because he still cared about Kim. He kept it hidden until one night when everything he had been suppressing found a way out through the specific catastrophic chemistry of full intoxication and years of compressed feeling and the particular anguish of watching someone you love love someo

Trapped behind a selective mutism that has bound her since childhood, Elena Brenette’s sharp mind is her only weapon. On her wedding morning, her envious older sister, Rachel, drugs her, steals her identity, and marries her fiancé. Broken and betrayed, Elena flees into a torrential midnight storm. On a rain-slicked cliffside road, her car collides with Sarah Venzagrase—a high-society bride running from her forced marriage to a terrifying billionaire. When the fire clears, a third driver is dead, Sarah has vanished into the shadows, and Elena is declared deceased. Elena wakes up in a heavily guarded private hospital wing. Pinning her wrist down is the ruthless, cold-eyed Luca Venzagrase. Because of an uncanny physical resemblance, he believes she is his runaway wife. Trapped inside a multi-billion-dollar fortress, called by a name that isn’t hers, and married to a powerful man who views her as an enemy to be broken, Elena makes a lethal choice. She will weaponize her selective mutism, allowing the family to mistake her deeply ingrained psychological defense mechanism for a manipulative silent performance. She plays the part of Sarah to systematically dismantle the empire from the inside out. But as Luca's cruelty transforms into a dangerous, obsessive devotion to the silent enigma in his home, a dark truth emerges from the family vaults. The cliffside crash wasn’t an accident. Elena and Sarah were identical triplets separated at birth—the true genetic heirs to a sovereign fortune the elite would kill to keep hidden. Now, surrounded by wolves, Elena must navigate high-society espionage and a toxic, high-tension marriage to reclaim her true name. She didn’t choose this war, but she will sit on the throne built from its ashes.