The Fallen Crown

Zara Marrok is handed to Alistair Vane to settle her father's gambling debt, and she walks into his house with a hidden ledger and a plan to take it apart from the inside. Killian Vane has been his father's instrument for 15 years, a cold heir raised to make the family's cruelest moves look like obedience, and his new bride is the first person in his life who has ever refused to flinch. Their marriage is a contract with a crown buried in it, and as Zara starts to map the house, the locked room, and the truth about the aunt who died before Killian was born, she realizes the debt that brought her here was manufactured by the man she married. The question becomes whether she will burn the house down with him inside it, or save him first. The house has already killed a woman who tried to run, and it is not finished with the women who stay, and the man who holds the key to the records room has been waiting his whole life for someone brave enough to take it.
This is a dark arranged-marriage romance about 2 people raised to be tools, and the slow, dangerous work of becoming people instead. It is a story about the difference between the cage and the life you build inside it, and about a woman who walks in armed with nothing but her nerve and her memory, and a husband who has to learn to put the knife down, once and for all, and choose her.
Inside, you'll discover:
• The floorboard ledger and the debt that was never real
• The changing lock and the garden door she cannot close
• The portrait on the stairs and the name neither of them speaks
• The gamble, the scar, and the brother caught in the crossfire
• The wire, the records room, and the confession he never saw coming
• The knife in the drawer and the night he puts it down
• The flight to the marina and the life they choose after the fall