Needle & Silk

He hired her to save his legacy. She ended up saving him.

Kady Bennett is a master of hiding pain. As Seattle's premier scar cover-up artist, she knows how to turn trauma into art. But when a mysterious lawyer offers her a check for $100,000 to take a blind job, she can't say no.

The terms: Complete silence. No phone. No contact with the outside world. The location: A brutalist fortress built into the side of a frozen mountain. The client: Julian Vance.

Julian is the ghost of Silicon Valley. A reclusive tech billionaire rumored to be disfigured, dangerous, or both. But when Kady meets him in the shadows of his concrete cage, she doesn't find a monster. She finds a man who is terrified.

Julian isn't paying her for art. He's paying her for survival. Diagnosed with a degenerative memory condition that is slowly erasing his mind, he needs Kady to tattoo the encryption keys to his life's work onto his skin before the data is lost forever.

But as Kady works on him, hour after painful hour, she realizes the "code" isn't just numbers. It's a map to a crime scene. A confession. And a warning.

Trapped in the storm with a man who forgets her name but remembers her touch, Kady has to make a choice. Finish the job and let him fade into the void, or decipher the ink and fight for the man beneath it.

Because the people hunting Julian are closing in. And they don't want the code read—they want it erased.