Zee Hilton leaned her head back against the tub, closing her eyes. The water soothed her body, but the war in her chest raged on. “I told you at dinner. I’ll never really be yours.” Ryan Rossi paused at the doorway, looking back at her with dark, unreadable eyes. “We’ll see. Rest that knee. Let me get on a call with your dad and let him know we are together.” Alone in the warm water, her dizziness had faded into heavy exhaustion, her body finally surrendering after the long day of calculated rebellions. She leaned forward in the oversized tub, resting her arms on the smooth marble edge and laying her head atop them. He returned quietly a few minutes later, carrying a tray with herbal tea. She felt when he stood before her but she was too tired to allow her eyes open. Her back was exposed where she leaned forward, water lapping gently way below her shoulder blades. His gaze sharpened as it fell on the tattoos. Those her popular tattoos as Lethal Scents, the city’s famous voice. Several elegant blue roses, beautifully inked across her back, their stems intertwined with delicate thorns that flows to her lower back inside the water. From a distance they looked like pure art. Up close, however, he noticed what most people never would. The roses were placed deliberately, strategically, to conceal something. Beneath the blue ink lay faint, raised scars. Thin, deliberate lines that spoke of old pain, perhaps from a knife or broken glass. One scar curved longer than the rest, as if someone had tried to mark her permanently. Ryan’s jaw tightened. He knew violence when he saw it. These weren’t accidental “Was all this to make you…. obedient?” he didn’t know when he said it out loud that she heard. On the day after her 26th crashed birthday party, Zee Hilton finds out that Ryan Rossi is her groom for the arranged marriage after five years of their kiss at her rooftop and the same day he also found out her little secret. Now she has to marry him.