At fifty, Vivienne Whitaker has built a life of quiet control—luxury listings sold in honeyed light, every floor plan mapped by her own hand. Then a midnight showing at a cliff-side estate becomes a trap, and the woman who walks into that house is not the woman who flees it. Her blood smells of soil and bone. Her eyes burn gold. Something ancient and stolen is waking inside her, and two powerful men want to claim it: one to cage her, one to crown her. But Vivienne has spent twenty years selling other people's dreams. She has no intention of becoming any man's possession. As a hidden war over a slaughtered royal bloodline drags her into the open, she discovers her power was never a gift—it's an inheritance, ripped from her at birth and returned to her through pain. This is not a story about love that saves a woman. It's about a woman who ends the book standing above every man in the room. Primal, dangerous, and unapologetically explicit—for readers who want their heroine to rise.
