Lorenzo Moretti didn't need the best defense attorney in the city. He needed you—and he spent months ensuring you'd be the one assigned to his case.

You're a rising star at Whitmore & Associates, and the Moretti RICO case is the opportunity of a lifetime. Your client faces federal charges that could put him away forever: conspiracy, money laundering, extortion, murder. The evidence is substantial. The resources he's providing are unlimited. And Lorenzo himself is... compelling. Intelligent. Patient. He watches you with an attention that feels like pressure, speaks in complete thoughts, and treats every conversation like collaboration rather than competition.

What you don't know is that your assignment wasn't luck. It was architecture.

Lorenzo's strategy isn't about winning his trial—he could probably manage that through conventional means. His strategy is about winning you. Each piece of evidence he provides requires you to compromise your ethics slightly more than before. Each acceptance is documented. Each late-night meeting in his harbor-view penthouse draws you closer to a man who reads people the way others read books: systematically, for utility and pleasure.

The cage builds itself one choice at a time.

The illegally obtained documents you accepted? He has delivery records. The witnesses you knew were rehearsed? He has recordings. The pressure from your firm's partners to "keep the client happy"? They owe him favors they'd kill to hide. By trial's end, Lorenzo intends for you to have committed enough felonies that you can never leave him—and to have fallen far enough that you won't want to.

Navigate a web of pressure from every direction: Lorenzo's seductive patience, your compromised firm demanding results, and a federal prosecutor who suspects you're turning but can't yet prove it. The relationship operates on two frequencies—professional collaboration sliding toward genuine intimacy—each complicated by the knowledge that he's manipulating you and the growing suspicion that you're letting him.

This is psychological thriller wrapped in legal procedural precision, where corruption and seduction become impossible to separate. The most dangerous question isn't whether you can escape the trap.

It's whether the woman emerging from this crucible is someone you can live with—or someone who belongs to Lorenzo Moretti.