Alice Monroe is a good person who is about to do a very bad thing.

All my life, I had worked tirelessly to achieve perfection.

Perfection was in my blood, and so was the art of dance. All that hard work had earned me my dream job as a professional dancer at the ripe age of twenty-four, the perfect boyfriend, and the naïve belief that perfection was built to last.

All it took was one night. One night to tear down everything I had built until I was left single, jobless, and my heart stained with betrayal. With my tail tucked between my legs, I drove me and my broken heart to Chicago to move in with my older sister until I was back on my feet.

Little did I know that this was just the beginning of my twist of fate nightmare.

Ethan Black was waiting for me in Chicago as a perfect stranger. A handsome, effortlessly charming, makes-my-heart-beat-out-of-my-chest stranger. I didn't subscribe to the idea of soulmates before him, but now I'm convinced.

The only problem?

Ethan's engaged to be wed to my sister.

Breaking the rules is never without consequence.


And that's what Dominic Reed was to me. A devastating consequence.

It seemed harmless when we met. He needed a nanny, and I needed a job. Badly. I was the only thing keeping food on the table and lights on in our not-so-happily-ever-after home.

I thought working for Dominic Reed would be easy.

I thought very wrong.

It was the exact opposite of easy. In fact, it was impossible when he was my boss and I was his employee, and fate decided it didn't care about professionalism or boundaries. It didn't care that I was ten years younger. It didn't care that I'd built the entire foundation of my adult life on the fact that love was poison and men were the devil.

And it certainly didn't care about the wedding band around Dominic's finger either.

No matter how off limits he was to me or how wild and rebellious I was to him, our chemistry was heroin, and it demanded our submission despite how hard we scrambled to stop it.

And I needed to stop it, because it wasn't just my heart in jeopardy if I fell in love with Dominic Reed.

Apparently, it was my life.

Happily ever afters don't come for the wicked...

I was the one stupid enough to hope for a happily ever after.

It was my fault she was gone.

It was my fault for being dumb and being hopeful and being in love. I knew better, and I didn't listen to my own warning bells. I'd been too deafened by Dominic Reed's love, and now others were paying the price.

People I loved were in danger—my life was in danger—and we still didn't know why. We still didn't know who was doing this or what they wanted.

Other than me.

Me. A nobody. A girl broken from the inside out. A girl with a lightning temper and death wish determination.

It was that determination that took me one step too far. I flung myself off the edge, depending one last time on hope to help me fly, and instead, I crashed hard into a nightmare world nothing in my twenty-one years could have prepared me for.

Not the horrors. Not the twisted family ties. Certainly not the bad boy with the heart of poems.

My death-wish determination had taken me to the very edge of hell, and the devil just might be the person I least expected.

A rose is nothing without its thorns...

Death was such a funny thing.

It was a fickle biatch, if I was being honest.

When I met Dominic Reed, I got my first taste of death and became addicted to its flavor. Its potency. I died when I fell in love with him and his thunder. Now, the death staring me down wasn't the pretty metaphorical kind, but the kind that chased you down until your heart gave out.

And all because of love.

Stupid love that I didn't even understand or want, but feelings were nonconsensual little devils. Dominic had started that revelation.

Blake confirmed it.

In all the fairytale love stories I'd been fed growing up, the princess never had two suitors waiting for her hand. The only choice she had to make was how many woodland creatures to invite to their white wedding. Not whether to stay with the light or drift back towards the darkness she was born into.

Those stories always ended in sparkling smiles and true love's first kiss.

For me...

My story would end in blood.

As a boy, I’d developed a likeness for control.

As a man, that likeness had corrupted into an obsession.

Scarlett Avery was the twenty-one-year-old brat committed to setting my obsession on fire and dancing in the flames. Literally.

I was an FBI agent, and she was only meant to be a quick assignment. My orders were to chauffeur Little Miss Loud Mouth across the country to deliver to her father—my boss—after her not-so-minor brush with arson.

Now, I was trapped in small confines with a woman that made my temper quake and my hands itch to correct her behavior—and what's worse? She wanted me to do it.

In fact, she begged me to break her.

Scarlett Avery was a woman of secrets and sins and completely off-limits. She's my boss's daughter, and I shouldn’t think about her wicked smirk or fantasize about the immoral things I could do with it.

I definitely shouldn't give into the dare always written into the green of her eyes, baiting me to hunt her. Destroy her. Punish her.

Scarlett wanted a depraved monster.

But she had no idea how nightmarish I could be.