Ruin Me Properly: She Asked Him to Teach Her Ruthlessness. He Was Too Good at It.
She thought power was something you inherited.
He taught her it was something you took.
When Vivienne Ashford walks into Declan Mercer's office without an appointment, without leverage, and without anything except the wreckage of her father's empire and the desperate clarity of someone who has run out of safer options, she expects a negotiation.
She gets an education.
Mercer is not a mentor. He has never pretended to be. He is the man who spent six years trying to dismantle everything her father built, and he agrees to teach her not because he believes in her but because it serves him. The terms are clean. The boundaries are clear. The arrangement is entirely transactional.
Vivienne agrees.
She should not have agreed.
Because Declan Mercer is extraordinarily good at what he does, which is to look at a person, identify every place where they are performing instead of being, and apply precisely the right pressure until the performance collapses and something real takes its place. He does not do this gently. He does not do this with kindness. He does it with the focused, relentless efficiency of a man who has spent his entire life turning difficult things into results.
And Vivienne is a very difficult thing.
Over four months of Tuesday and Thursday mornings, she learns to read a boardroom the way other people read faces. She learns that silence is a weapon, that stillness is armor, that the most dangerous thing you can do in a room full of powerful people is to stop pretending you belong there and simply belong. She learns to close deals, manage boards, and outmaneuver men who have been playing this game since before she knew the game existed.
She also learns something Mercer did not intend to teach her.
She learns him.
Ruin Me Properly is a dark billionaire romance for readers who are tired of heroines who need to be saved and heroes who are redeemed too easily. This is the story of two people who are genuinely formidable, genuinely dangerous to each other, and genuinely unable to stop. It is a story about power, about the cost of becoming who you need to be, and about what happens when the person who tears you apart is also the only person who has ever seen you clearly.
It will not leave you where it found you.
"The most psychologically precise romance I have read in years. I did not expect to feel this much."
For readers of: The Devil Wears Prada, The Atlas Six, A Little Life, and everyone who wished Succession had a love story with actual stakes.
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