victoriawrites0
In a city where art is currency and secrets are the ultimate commodity, Lira Vance, a brilliant and desperate art forger, sells her genius to keep her sister alive and her mother cared for. Haunted by the ghost of her father-a painter destroyed by the elegant cruelty of magnate Silas Thorne-Lira survives in the shadows, her life a fragile ledger of debts and desperation.
Unbeknownst to her, her struggle is observed by Cillian Gray, the city's most powerful and reclusive logistics billionaire. But Cillian is a fiction. Beneath the tailored suits lies Cillian Kaine, the last heir of a mafia dynasty shattered by Thorne's betrayal. For fifteen years, he has built a new kind of empire from the ashes, not with bullets, but with data, debt, and cold calculation. His sole purpose: the meticulous, utter destruction of Silas Thorne.
He needs the perfect weapon. Not a forger, but a forgery herself. A woman whose very existence is a testament to Thorne's evil, with the talent to bait the trap and the desperation to walk into it willingly.
Their story is a collision of two broken worlds. It is a dark romance rooted in vengeance, not love; a gothic thriller set in penthouse galleries and underworld vaults; a psychological game between a man who trades in control and a woman who has mastered the art of survival.
Lira is offered a deal: a year of marriage as Cillian's gilded wife, in exchange for her sister's lifetime of care and a front-row seat to Thorne's ruin. It is a contract, a performance, and a sentence. But as they are forced into a partnership of twisted intimacy, the lines between manipulation and protection, between revenge and obsession, begin to blur. In a world where everything is a fake-identities, paintings, loyalties-the most dangerous forgery of all might be the feelings growing between them.