Vows and Vendettas
"Your wife." He said it with the practiced warmth of the professionally networked - and Romy Vance said Arden Sterling's name the way you said someone's name when it was simply a name and not a social grenade. It wasn't. It was both. And somewhere in the space between performance and truth, something had already begun that neither of them had authorized.
Arden Sterling has spent six years becoming the most effectively masked operative in their family's history - a non-binary socialite-spy who moves through old-money galas like water through stone, stealing surveillance fragments while wearing their grandmother's lipstick like a cage made of glass. The Sterling name is a weapon, and Arden has learned to carry it without being cut. The one thing they have never learned is how to put it down.
Romy Vance grew up with seventeen foster addresses and exactly one talent that an intelligence agency was willing to pay for: the ability to make anyone believe they are being genuinely seen. Her empathy isn't a performance. It's a precision instrument - and it's the reason Director Vane selected her for the most dangerous assignment of her career: become Arden Sterling's wife.
The cover is a legal marriage. The mission is to open a biometric vault containing the Gilded Scion Index - a global surveillance architecture their dead grandmother spent thirty years and several billion dollars building in secret. The complication is Protocol 6: the standing order that authorizes either operative to eliminate the other if the mission is compromised.
What unfolds across the European social circuit - from Paris safe houses to Sardinian yachts to a private island with a thirty-meter vault beneath it - is a slow collision between two people who have been trained to use connection as a tool and have never been shown what it looks like when it's real. Arden, who has not allowed anyone close enough to matter in years, finds Romy impossibly difficult to dismiss. Romy, who has spent her career reading people with forensic accuracy, finds that Arden is the first person who has ever looked back.
But the handlers are watching. The vault is waiting. And the question beneath every careful glance and every almost-touch is whether the marriage that began as a cover will survive contact with the truth - and whether either of them will let it.
Vows and Vendettas is a slow-burn spy romance with a sapphic love story at its center - sharp, atmospheric, and emotionally precise. Perfect for readers who want their espionage with genuine longing and their love stories with real stakes.
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