She needs a green card. He needs a wife by the end of the quarter, or he loses everything. Selene Davonsville has three weeks before deportation tears apart the life she built in New York. Crane Smith has a fortune riding on a marriage he never wanted. Their deal is simple: one year, on paper only, no feelings involved. But moving into his home means performing for his controlling family, his cutthroat firm, and a city that watches every move they make, and somewhere between the staged smiles and the rehearsed touches, the lie starts feeling less like a lie. A scheming cousin wants Crane's empire and is willing to burn them both down to get it. An ex-fiancée is hiding a secret darker than betrayal. And a man from Selene's past is about to remind her exactly why she ran. Some contracts are just paper. This one might cost them everything, or give them everything they never let themselves want.

Selene Calloway can copy anything she sees. And a few things she’s never seen. A broke art restorer with a side hustle she’d rather not discuss, Selene is one bad month away from losing everything. Then she spills champagne on Rafael Cross, the coldest billionaire in Chicago, and tells him exactly what she thinks of his manners. He rejects her work in front of a roomful of people. By morning, he’s offering her the biggest commission of her life. The job: finish a haunting, half-painted portrait of a woman with her back turned. Selene has never met her. But when she completes it, Rafael goes pale, and she learns the woman’s name: Bianca. His missing partner. The woman who vanished three years ago. Now strange men are following Selene home. A silver-haired stranger insists Rafael is hiding something. And Rafael, who never lets anyone close, can’t seem to stay away from her. Every argument crackles. Every almost-kiss leaves her breathless. And every secret he keeps makes it harder to tell whether she’s falling for a protector or walking straight into a trap. When Sergei Volkov’s men storm Rafael’s hotel, Selene is forced to run with the one man she was warned never to trust. But the truth about Bianca is darker than either of them imagined, and Selene’s talent is the key to all of it. Rafael swore he would protect his empire at any cost. He never planned on her being the price.

"Oh, little dove, you belong to me now. The sooner you accept that, the easier it will be for you." "I don't belong to anyone," she said defiantly. As Alessandro walked slowly toward her, his eyes became darker and shone with desire. He then says, "You might want to think about what you just said again by the time I'm done with you tonight.” When twenty-year-old Alessia Rossi is given as collateral in settlement of her father's debts to the most powerful Don in Italy, she believes it's temporary. A few weeks in Northern Italy, and then she will be back to her regular life in Southern Italy or so she thought. A ruthless mafia don, who has his entire empire built on fear and control, finds something new ignited in him by Alessia's defiance: obsession. And with time this obsession becomes something crazier than he could ever imagine. Just as passion begins to burn between captor and captive, dangerous secrets pops out of the blue. But the most explosive secret of all lies buried in Alessia's past—one that will make her the most powerful woman in the criminal underworld. The question isn't whether she'll survive. It's whether anyone else will.