Eimee Vasari studies liars for a living. She can spot a false confession from a single sentence. She can hear the exact moment language bends under the weight of a lie.

She didn't hear Oleg Clement coming.

He arrived at her university as a visiting scholar. Quiet, watchful, too precise to be what he claimed. She noticed the cracks in his cover before she noticed the way he looked at her, like a man cataloguing something he intended to keep.

By the time she learned the truth, that her name was in a thirty-year-old treaty, that she had been promised to a man she'd never met, that Oleg had won her in a contest and come to collect, she was already in too deep to walk away.

But Eimee Vasari is not a woman who gets collected. She is a woman who finds the seam in every lie, every system, every structure built to contain her.

Including him.

The Vasari Girl. Book One of the Vasari Trilogy.

Content warnings: obsessive hero, surveillance, morally grey everything, explicit scenes, violence, forced proximity, dark themes. HEA guaranteed across the trilogy.