Forced Matrimony With An Unhinged Menace

Tattiana Taylor makes it as far as her own driveway.

Suitcase in the trunk, new life mapped out in her head, she really believes she’s slipped the noose of the arranged marriage her father promised on her behalf. Then a black SUV blocks her car, hands drag her out into the cold air, and the man she ran from finally looks her in the eye.

Kaseem Carter doesn’t raise his voice. He doesn’t have to. His power is in the way the guards step back when he walks past, in the quiet compound surrounded by cameras and concrete, in the contract that says his inheritance only becomes his if he marries now and produces an heir within a year. Emotion doesn’t enter into it. Business, blood, and timing do.

Tatti wakes up in a mansion that smells like polished wood and gun oil, with locked doors, designer clothes in her size, and no exit that isn’t watched. Outside the gates, bodies start appearing. Inside, women from Kaseem’s past linger like perfume in the hallways and whispers in the staff corridors. The Carter empire is under siege, and Tatti has been dropped in the center of the battlefield wearing a wedding ring.

She is not the docile bride Kaseem ordered. She’s sharp-mouthed, impulsive, fiercely loyal to the few people she loves—and she’s carrying secrets that could crack his empire straight down the middle. The more he tries to mold her into something obedient, the more she pulls him into her chaos, until lust, loyalty, and violence are woven so tight neither of them can tell where one ends and the other begins.

By the time they realize they’re falling for each other in the middle of all this ruin, Tatti’s worst nightmare has shifted: it’s no longer marrying the unhinged menace who stole her—it’s what will be left of either of them if his enemies finally breach the gates.