I see him on the street, encounter him at the pier. He’s there when my family is murdered, and I must decide: is this man someone I can trust, a killer—or both? Falling for him is easy because I have nothing more to lose. But she does, so I take her and run to England with him.

Power … he is power. I want to breathe it in. I need to feel it inside me.

His stately country house is my refuge, but it’s his sensual and commanding presence that becomes my home and strengthens me. A rising dark threat closes in, and we vow to defy the course of fatal events before us. We promise to live. The obsession—this intense love story of ours—is the one thing we can’t survive.