Arrange Deception | VK

BOOK #5

What do you get when you try to cure poison with poison?

A catastrophe.
Shattered glass.
Screams behind closed doors.
And one infuriating novelist who keeps dragging me into his worlds like I belong there.

This wasn't in the fine print when I accepted the assignment.

A forged identity.
A counterfeit guardian.
A wolf dressed in security black, slipped into the orbit of that wide-eyed storm who never stops narrating his own life.

Boo Seungkwan-
the Kwon empire's beating heart,
their vulnerable hinge,
their radiant little jewel my family demanded I tarnish with my own hands.

That was the blueprint.
Cold.
Straightforward.
Merciless.

And it was working.
Perfectly.

Until it wasn't.

Until my gaze kept drifting back to him.
Until my jaw betrayed me with a smile at his ridiculous plot twists.
Until desire coiled hot and sharp in my lower spine-
unwanted, relentless, shameful-
every time he breathed out "captain," voice dipped in honey and lips flushed like sin itself.

And the structure of my life-
the oaths,
the schemes,
the years of inherited rage,
the bloodline I was chained to-

all of it fractures.
Splinters.
Falls apart at the slightest tilt of his head.

Because the most fatal enemy isn't the one you're sent to kill-

it's the one you start wanting to keep.