Ask Permission Before Running

"The safest prison is the one you build around a woman who doesn't know yet that she's already home."

Fallon Reed knows how to build a case, but she doesn't know how to escape one. Moments before marrying a man who broke her wrist and disguised it as a clumsy fall, she flees through the service corridors of the luxurious Grand Mercy Hotel. With armed mercenaries hunting her in the parking garage, her only salvation is Mercer Blythe, the hotel's enigmatic and dangerous Chief of Security.

Mercer doesn't just offer her a hiding place; he locks her in a biometric-sealed executive suite on the thirty-fourth floor. It's a flawless sanctuary, stocked with her favorite books and exactly how she takes her coffee. But Fallon soon discovers the terrifying truth: her rescue wasn't a coincidence. It was a calculated trap.

Mercer has been obsessively surveilling her from the shadows for twenty-two months, compiling a 340-page dossier on her traumas, her habits, and her failed escape attempts. He anticipated her flight and engineered this cage specifically to keep her captive—and completely his.

Trapped inside an impenetrable fortress, Fallon holds a stolen USB drive containing explosive evidence of a fourteen-million-dollar corruption network that could destroy both her ex-fiancé and her corrupt judge father. While a ruthless bounty hunter lays siege to the building outside, a dangerous psychological game begins inside.

Fallon must decide if the man who built a surveillance system around her life is her ultimate captor, or the only partner she can trust to help her burn her past to the ground.