Take The Empty Chair Beside Him

"The cruelest prisons are the ones with open doors."

Allegra Finch makes her living reading the unreadable. As a freelance behavioral tell-reader in Nevada's underground poker rooms, she survives by staying invisible and analyzing the physical ticks of wealthy men. But there is one man she cannot read, and he has been watching her for eighteen months.

Stoker Vail is a man of terrifying stillness and absolute control. He doesn't play games he can't win, and he doesn't leave his acquisitions to chance. Obsessed with the one woman who cracked his poker face in just seven hands, Stoker silently buys up her father's crippling $340,000 gambling debt. His price for her father's freedom? Allegra must serve as his strategic partner during an exclusive, high-stakes, three-night poker tournament at a remote, sealed desert estate.

For seven months, Stoker kept the chair beside him empty, waiting for her to sit down. Now that she's trapped inside his brutalist concrete villa, Allegra realizes the poker tournament is only a front. The real game is between the two of them. Amidst grueling psychological manipulation, intense surveillance, and a blurring line between captivity and desire, Allegra must decide if she will be a pawn in a wealthy man's obsessive architecture—or if she will take the seat of power for herself.