The fairy-tale life of heiress Seraphina is shattered by the hands of her own fiancé and stepsister on the eve of her engagement. A malicious conspiracy sees her drugged, abducted, and imprisoned in the remote mountains. In her desperate escape, she has a fateful entanglement with a mysterious man in a silver mask. Returning from hell, battered and broken, she uncovers an even more shocking secret—she is pregnant. The existence of this child transforms her grief into a sharpened blade and ignites an unquenchable fire for revenge. As she lies in wait within her own home, ready to bare her claws, the mysterious masked man reappears like a phantom. He knows all of her secrets and the depth of her predicament, and he presents her with an irresistible devil's bargain: "Marry me, and I will help you with your revenge."Forced to choose, Seraphina must weigh her solitary struggle against an alliance with this man of immense power and lethal danger. For the sake of vengeance, and for the child she must protect, she agrees—stepping onto a path of a contract marriage, paved with lies, tests, and the shadows of a perilous, unknown love.

One moment, she was Tala, a California sweetheart cherished by her brilliant lawyer father. The next, a twisted verdict sentences her to life as a canary in the gilded cage of her estranged mother and new, powerful stepfather. She may be a victim forced into this conspiracy, but she's determined to be the player who overturns the entire board. From shattering the facade of a hypocritical dinner party to digging up the dirty secrets hidden beneath the family's glamorous surface, Tala arms herself with thorns, using her sharp wit as a weapon to tear everyone's masks to shreds. But as cracks begin to appear in the image of her "perfect" father, and she uncovers the real reason for her mother's hidden fear, Tala realizes the truth behind the trial is far darker than she ever imagined. In a war where no one can be trusted, her only light is the boy next door—the one person who sees past her hardened disguise. Navigating a world of treacherous family politics and dark secrets, she vows to take back everything that was stolen from her: her freedom, and the truth.

On her nineteenth birthday, the city's brightest heiress, Evelyn Sinclair, was thrown into the abyss by her own father. A single glass of drugged champagne was all it took to transform her from a cherished daughter into a plaything, priced and sold for an old man’s pleasure. At the edge of despair, she burned her last ounce of strength to escape, only to crash into another, more dangerous cage—the room of the city’s true king, Alexander Sterling. To survive, she traded a desperate kiss for one night of sanctuary. When morning came, she stole his money and vanished like a ghost, unaware she had also taken his only secret, a secret bound to her by blood. Five years later, she returns in a blaze of glory. No longer the lamb led to the slaughter, she is now ‘Nyx’, the enigmatic, bestselling author whose fortune and fame command the world’s attention. She moves in shadows, planning her retribution, ready to drag those who wronged her into her own custom-built hell. But the devil she fled has already laid his inescapable trap. He, Alexander Sterling, binds her to his side with a cold, cruel contract, forcing her into a sham marriage to punish the woman who dared to defy and ‘use’ him five years ago. He takes pleasure in her torment, completely unaware that the brilliant boy-and-girl twins who shadow her steps—the ones who share his stormy grey eyes and his shocking intellect—are the living, breathing truth of the night he’s never been able to forget. When the lies are peeled away, when his ‘prey’ finally reveals her claws, when father and sons meet for the first time on the battlefield of fate...This time, will his entire empire be enough to atone for his sins?