She came back for revenge. She never planned to fall in love.Noelle Elise Avenoir has learned three things about the world,love makes you vulnerable, loyalty has a price and trust is a luxury she can no longer afford.Once, she believed in forever. She believed in the man who promised her a future, in the family that raised her and in the life she was building for herself. Then ambition proved more powerful than love, and the people she trusted made decisions that cost her everything.Years later, Noelle has become everything they never expected and everything they should fear.Wealthy, calculating and devastatingly difficult to read, she has reinvented herself and returned with one purpose,to destroy the empire of the man who betrayed her. Every move is calculated. Every weakness is studied. Every step brings her closer to the downfall she has spent years preparing.Then she meets Dominic Belmont.Charming, formidable, and frustratingly perceptive, Dominic is her business rival and the one man who refuses to be manipulated by her. Their relationship begins with competition, sharp disagreements and an attraction neither is willing to acknowledge but beneath their rivalry grows something neither anticipated,a connection that threatens to reach the parts of Noelle she has spent years burying.For the first time, she encounters someone who sees through her carefully constructed defences and doesn’t mistake her strength for an absence of pain but Noelle has a secret.Her revenge began long before Dominic entered her life. By the time he discovers the truth, her plans are already in motion and the final decision is hers alone to make. Dominic won’t ask her to abandon her choices for his sake but he won’t pretend those choices have no consequences, either.Then the past reveals a truth that changes everything.The betrayal that shaped Noelle’s life was more complicated than she knew. Her own family helped orchestrate her downfall, forcing her to confront the people she trusted most and the uncomfortable truth that she, too, once sacrificed someone else’s future out of fear.Revenge was supposed to give her back her power.Instead, it forces her to confront the woman she has become.Because destroying the people who hurt her may be the easiest thing Noelle has ever done.Learning to live with herself afterward may be the hardest.And loving Dominic may require something more frightening than revenge ever did, the courage to stop running from the possibility of being hurt again.In a world where everyone has something to gain, Noelle must decide whether getting everything she wanted is worth losing the person she might still become.