He was sent to take everything she has. She set a bowl in front of him instead.
Request an ARCIn a city where every kindness creates a debt, love may be the most dangerous account of all.
Cha Seoyeon has spent nine years paying for her father's mistakes.
His gambling debts have already cost her nearly everything. Now a forged property transfer has put her late mother's restaurant — and the aging Seoul neighborhood built around it — in the hands of Daeseong Development. The company wants every resident gone before spring.
Seoyeon refuses to sign.
Kang Jinhyuk is the man sent to change her mind.
For twenty years, he has cleared streets quietly, leaving behind signed agreements instead of bruises and respectable paperwork instead of witnesses. He knows exactly how to make a neighborhood too frightened and exhausted to resist. But Seoyeon's restaurant smells like the home he lost as a child, and the woman behind its counter sees through every careful silence he has built his life upon.
As pressure closes around the block, Seoyeon enters the criminal world financing its destruction, keeping its secret accounts to buy her neighbors more time. Jinhyuk begins defying the only man who ever gave him a home. Their growing attraction could save them, destroy them, or make them complicit in something neither can forgive.
Sadie Vaughn writes dark romance about the quiet negotiations between people who shouldn't trust each other. Her stories live in the space between obligation and want — where every kindness is either a lifeline or a weapon.
She likes sharp dialogue, morally complicated men, and women who refuse to be collateral. She believes the best love stories are the ones where surrender is never simple.
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