She finds the second set of books three minutes before he finds her.

Elena Vance is three weeks behind on her mother's medical bills and one scandal away from unemployable when a "routine" merger audit drops into her lap, paying enough to keep her quiet and desperate enough that she doesn't ask why. She should walk away the second the numbers stop making sense. She doesn't.

Matteo Marchetti runs a shipping empire that's really a laundering operation, and someone inside his own family has been bleeding it dry for over a year. He buried his fiancée two years ago for getting too close to what he really is, and he swore no one else would pay that price. He didn't plan on the one person smart enough to find his thief being a woman; he can't stop watching.

He catches her with his private ledgers at ten o'clock at night, and every rule says she should already be dead. Instead, he makes her an offer she can't refuse: find the traitor, live in his house where he can protect her, and disappear afterward with enough money to never look back. Walking away was never actually on the table—not with what she'd already seen, and not with what he'd already decided about her.

If she doesn't find his enemy before the rival family's patience runs out, this stops being a quiet family matter and becomes a war neither of them survives.

She's already found more than the money trail. She's found the one thing he swore he'd never let himself want again.