Ellie Calloway goes to an auction to beg for mercy and walks out belonging unofficially,privately and completely to a man she has never met.Adrian Virelli buys her father's debt and offers her a choice, work for him until it's repaid, orwatch her father lose everything.She agrees and moves into his cliffside mansion and begins to understand that the arrangementis not what it appeared to be.The house holds secrets, a locked wing. Paintings of women who share her face and a manwho watches her with the particular attention of someone who already knows the answer to aquestion she hasn't thought to ask.When she finds the portrait of her face, her exact face, dated twelve years before her birth,labeled Isabel everything begins to unravel. The woman Adrian told her about, the woman whobetrayed him, was not his lover.She was his father's love and also Ellie's mother.Adrian has spent years searching for Isabel's daughter. He engineered the auction, the debtacquisition, all of it to bring Ellie here. To find the truth. To fulfill a promise made by a dyingman.But Isabel's death was not an accident and the man who killed her is still powerful, stilldangerous, and now aware that Isabel's daughter has been found.The story becomes a race between love and legacy between two people learning to trust eachother while the past tries to bury them both.