The Acquisition

Uploading a Chapter a Day until Early Feb 2026

Freya Lockridge has been surviving on willpower and spite since she was seventeen-the day her parents abandoned her and her younger brother Liam without warning. Seven years later, she's finally built something that looks like success: a junior acquisitions editor position at the prestigious Blackwell & Sable Publishing House in London.
She works brutal hours. She never complains. She's one catastrophe away from falling apart.
Then the catastrophe arrives.
Liam calls in a panic: he owes loan sharks. Seventy-two hours to pay or face violent consequences. Freya empties her savings, sells her car, and begs every lender she can find. It's not enough. She ends up getting two weeks to find additional money she doesn't have.
All while pretending everything is fine at work.
But Freya has never been invisible to Damian Blackwell and Rowan Sable.
Damian-the ice-cold CEO with impossible standards-has been quietly noticing her exhaustion, her dedication, and now, her unraveling. Rowan-the ex-military COO with a protective streak he can't explain-finds her having panic attacks and sees dangerous men circling her outside the office.
Neither man does relationships. Neither has let anyone close in years.
But when Freya's two-week deadline approaches and she disappears with a plan that could get her killed, both men make a choice: respect her boundaries and watch her fall, or cross every professional line to pull her back from the edge.
Some women are born to be protected. Some men are born to protect. And some stories are born from the moment those two truths collide.

Content warnings: A dark MFM romance featuring morally grey protective alphas, forced proximity, workplace power dynamics, touch her and die, financial abuse, threats of violence, panic attacks, polyamorous slow burn. Touch her and die. Found family and a heroine fighting for survival in a world where owing the wrong people changes everything.