He hired her to scrub floors.
He kept her to study her mind.
What he really wanted was to see how much she could endure.
Millicent Carr is twenty-four, a thief from Whitechapel with blood on her hands and numbers in her head-too sharp, too hungry, too ungovernable to belong anywhere except the gutter.
Until Viscount Thornwick.
A ruined lord.
A disgraced scientific prodigy.
A man whose early brilliance made him famous-and whose failures have left him desperate for one final discovery to restore his name.
Thornwick does not believe in miracles.
He believes in measurement.
He says he wants Millicent's mind.
Her memory.
Her perception.
Her endurance.
He believes she may be proof of something Victorian science refuses to admit: that genius is not a male inheritance.
What begins as experimentation becomes fixation.
He studies her.
Measures her.
Pushes her further with every test.
Until the line between research and obsession disappears.
And Millicent wants it.
The attention.
The focus.
The dangerous intimacy of being seen too closely by the one man powerful enough to ruin her.
Readers will find:
Dark gothic Victorian romance
Scientist / subject obsession
Dangerous intellectual tension
Ruined lord street-thief heroine
Class divide & forced proximity
Experiments, instruments & endurance tests
High heat, heavy angst