Looking For Ashes

It's 1984, and the Cold War rages on behind closed doors of luxury and lies. To save his empire's name from his daughter's spiraling addiction, Dante Moretti, Italy's foremost weapons inventor, offers his daughter as collateral- her hand in marriage to a man she's never met.

Aika Moretti is beautiful, volatile, and brilliant in ways that unsettle men who think they understand power. When she arrives in Moscow to marry Caesar Sokolov, the cold and commanding heir to one of Russia's most feared dynasties, she's meant to be a symbol of alliance- Italy's price for peace and the USSR's promise of continued luxury. But the moment Caesar and his father Vladimir meet her, the illusion of control begins to unravel.

Aika speaks like a poet, thinks like a strategist, and hides her hunger- for escape, for life, for something more- behind the white dust of her addiction. Vladimir sees in her a spark he thought long extinguished; Caesar sees a woman who threatens the order he's built his life upon.

As politics tighten their noose and passion ignites behind closed doors, Aika becomes the fracture line in an empire of men- a force that neither love nor loyalty can contain. In a world fueled by desire and deceit, she will either burn them all to ruin... or teach them what it means to feel alive.