Detective Nathaniel Rourke is eleven days into a cover identity inside Aveline International, the most exclusive matchmaking house on the Eastern Seaboard. Nineteen women have left that agency on legitimate fiancee visas in four years. Nineteen women have never been seen again.
The last agent who sat in his chair came out of the Mystic River in November with his hands zip tied.
On day eleven, the agency's founder pours him a drink, hands him a lavender file, and asks him to find out what Sabine Roth is.
The file is a nightmare. Three enrollments under three slightly different lives. References that dissolve when touched. A conservator's job that checks out and a childhood that does not exist. And Sabine Roth, documented, in three cities within seventy-two hours of three of the disappearances.
Every piece of it says recruiter.
None of it explains the money leaving her account, or the tremor in her left hand, or why a woman that composed cannot be in a room with the door closed.
Four days until the January cycle closes and nine more women board a plane. A leak inside his own task force. A security chief reverifying his cover one phone call at a time. And a woman who has already started profiling him back, who kisses him against cold stone in the snow like she has decided to spend something she cannot get back.
He was sent to prove what she is.
He is going to prove it.
And the answer is going to cost her the only thing she has left to lose.
A dark, explicit, breathlessly paced romantic suspense novel about a man trained to read people, a woman who has survived eleven years by making herself unreadable, and four days in which neither of them can afford to be wrong.
Standalone. No cliffhanger.
A note on content: this novel concerns human trafficking. It contains no depiction of victimization on the page and no sexual content involving any victim. All sexual content occurs between two consenting adults and is explicit. Also contains gun violence and the deaths of named characters.