Author Description

A dark contemporary romance with corporate thriller elements in the shadow of corporate corruption and family legacy Every morning at 6:47 AM, Tristan Cross makes two cups of coffee in an empty break room. One for him. One for the ghost of his father, who died at this exact moment three years ago, crushed by a machine that should have been fixed. He's hunting the man responsible: Harold Winters, the CEO who calls dead workers "acceptable losses." He never expected to find Harold's daughter there, making her own ritual out of grief. Wren Winters has been her father's captive audience since she was seven, memorizing murder plans discussed over pot roast, watching him destroy families between dessert courses. She keeps evidence hidden in teddy bears and recordings tucked in music boxes. Until Tristan. She knows which safety reports were buried. He knows which officials took bribes. But somewhere between shared grief and terrible coffee, they commit the unforgivable sin in Harold's kingdom: they fall in love. When Wren hands him the key to her mother's storage unit packed with enough evidence to destroy an empire, she's not just risking discovery. She's choosing him over everything she's been taught to protect. Harold Winters has been watching all along, letting them think they're clever. When he strikes, it's with surgical precision. Wren is six weeks pregnant when her father presents his ultimatum: publicly destroy Tristan with such cruelty he'll never come back, or watch him die in an accident. Brake lines are so unreliable, after all. Just ask her mother. So Wren does what Harold trained her to do. She performs. In one devastating dinner, she convinces the man she loves that everything between them was a lie. That she chose money over love. That he was "adequate entertainment" but nothing more. For 702 days, they exist in parallel grief. Tristan rebuilds in Chicago, saving other families from corp