He didn't save me. He acquired me.

Marlowe Calloway spent three years building a career nobody in her family thought she'd survive — marine fraud investigator, sharp enough to trace a falsified manifest across four shell companies and two oceans. She didn't expect the trail to end at the private dock of Alexios Drakos, the man Athens calls the Drakos family's shadow, the one who fixes what the family can't afford to have seen.

She didn't expect he'd already know her name before she said it.

Alexios has one order: get the American off the board before her own father's debts get her killed. The easiest way to keep a asset from being found is to make sure nobody's looking — which means Marlowe doesn't leave the island. Not her choice. Not up for negotiation. He tells himself it's protection. He knows, the first night she stands on his terrace daring him to just try and stop her from leaving, that it's something far more dangerous than duty.

She is not supposed to be his. She is leverage, a liability, a countdown clock on a war he didn't start. And she is the only thing in his controlled, calculated life he cannot make himself let go of.

Marlowe knows exactly what she is to him — a problem with a pulse. But the longer Alexios keeps her behind gates and armed men "for her own good," the harder it gets to hate the way he watches her like she's already his to keep. When the truth about her father surfaces and the men hunting her stop caring whether Alexios wants her alive, she'll have to decide whether the cage was ever really the danger — or if it was the only place she was ever safe.

Contains explicit adult content, dubious-consent power dynamics played for fantasy, and a guaranteed HEA. For readers 18+ only.

Tropes: Forced Proximity • Possessive Alpha • Mafia Romance • Forbidden • Kidnapping-as-Protection • Wealth & Opulence