One Last Kiss, Before You let Me Go

For three years, the world believed Vivian Hayes lived a fairytale. On the glossy covers of New York's society magazines, she stood beside Damien Cross--- Manhattan's favorite billionaire prince---with a smile that was soft, graceful, perfect. The elite adored them. The tabloids crowned them the city's golden couple. Strangers whispered that they wanted what Vivian had. But Vivian had nothing. Behind the marble walls of their Upper East Side penthouse, she was not a wife---she was an arrangement. A contract. A legal illusion signed in ink and silence. Her job was simple: look devoted, stay elegant, and protect Damien's image at all costs. She succeeded. And then she walked away. Vivian agreed to Damien's divorce, but her compliance was only another performance. She demanded cash---not love, not property. Twenty million dollars wired into discreet accounts before she ever signed her name. She demanded Damien personally take her to JFL, escort her to her gate, and give her the one thing she had never recievd in their marriage. A real kiss. It lasted five seconds. By the time Damien's car reentered Manhattan, the fight had disappeare from the radar over the Atlantic. Vivian Hayes was declared dead within the week. Damien's grief curdled into something colder than mournin. Something ravenous. Her final voicemail---her screams, alarms balring, metal groaning--played on a loop in his mind until grief hardened into obsession. And then, months later, he uncovered the truth. Vivian was never on the plane. She had staged the entire tragedy---the voicemail, the disappearance, the grieving city. She walked away from their marraige alive, wealthy, and free---leaving Damien with nothing but questions and the ghost of a woman who had never been real. Eight years passed. Women emerged, each claiming to be Vivian, each more desperate than the last. None knew that the marriage had been a secret only by Damian and his lawyer. None lnew the real Vivian. None could fool him. Until Serena Blake. A bestselling author visiting New York for a major book event. A woman with Vivian's identical face. Vivian's eyes. Vivian's smile. A woman who had woken in a West Virginia hospital eight years ago with no memory, no past, and scars she couldn't explain. Damien's heart recgonized her. His mind doubted her. His obsession ignited. Was she Vivian, returned to torment him? Or an innocent stranger caught in the undertow. of a lie she never lived? As Damien chases the truth, desire twists into something darker. Vegeance tenders with loinging. And the line between the man he is and the monster she created blurs--- All because of a wifw who never existed.