Your father's debts came due. The price was you.

The Carrington name once commanded respect in Ashford's elite circles—senators, philanthropists, old money that built this city from bedrock. Now the fortune is gone, the legacy is ash, and the only thing of value your family has left is their daughter.

Luca Vancetti needs what money can't buy: legitimacy. The most powerful crime lord on the Eastern seaboard wants a bride who can open doors that have always been closed to men like him. A Carrington wife means charity boards, political fundraisers, children who inherit acceptance instead of violence. In exchange, your family's shame disappears. Their debts erased. Their enemies kept at bay.

The terms are simple. The cage is gilded. And Luca has made one thing clear—he wants a willing wife, not a broken one.

But compliance isn't in your nature.

Navigate a world where old money families trade on bloodlines while criminals in bespoke suits carve up the city's future. Your captor is patient, calculating, and dangerously intrigued by your defiance. His enforcer Marco—six feet of silence and scar tissue—watches your every move with something that might be duty or might be something else entirely. And circling in the shadows, the rival Rossi family sees you as the perfect weapon to destroy everything Luca has built.

Dante Rossi offers promises of freedom wrapped in charm that feels like a threat. Escape may be possible—but the cost of misplaced trust could be worse than the cage you're trying to flee.

In the penthouse prison with its floor-to-ceiling windows, every conversation is negotiation. Every silence is strategy. Every accidental touch raises questions you're not sure you want answered. The luxury suffocates. The danger seduces. And somewhere beneath Luca's patience, you suspect he's hiding something about why he really wants you.

Will you find a way out? Burn everything down? Learn to rule beside him? Or discover that the monster who bought you is becoming something far more complicated than enemy or captor?

The antique ring on your finger contains a GPS tracker. The man who put it there is waiting to see what you'll do next.