No one hears the way a girl disappears.
Not the scream she swallows... not the name she burns... not the way she turns her face to glass and teaches herself not to need.
The night Evelyn Evans vanished, the world didn't blink, not when the candles on her birthday cake flickered untouched, not when the call came through... a voice wrapped in sirens, saying words like impact, coma, unlikely.
Not even when the house emptied, the friends fell quiet, and the bills began to multiply like roaches beneath the floorboards.
It was her eighteenth birthday, the day she was supposed to become something, instead, she became no one.
Her parents were breathing... but not alive.
Her life was intact... but not living.
And when hope stopped answering, Evelyn did what grief demands, she disappeared from daylight.
Rose was born in the dark.
She was not a girl, she was an escape plan stitched into lace.
The kind of beauty men paid to imagine touching, but couldn't afford to own.
A masked goddess of Club Dusk, where the rules were simple... look, want, leave broke.
Rose learned early how to bend a man's hunger without ever letting him taste.
She learned the art of smiling with dead eyes, of whispering lies in time with the bass, of becoming desire without being devoured by it.
But no one dances forever.
And monsters don't always wear fangs... some wear suits and smile while they buy your silence in cash.
The night everything changed, she wasn't dancing.
She was being delivered.
Her lips were numb and swollen, her dress torn, her body... present, her mind... floating.
The price had been paid, but not to love her, to own her, to have a taste.
But fate has a cruel sense of humor.
The man waiting behind the hotel door wasn't the monster, he was something colder.
Jace Montez.
A billionaire, brutal, a man made of marble and menace, whose name alone makes grown men swallow their pride.
He didn't come for pleasure, he came for control.
And in that moment... when he found her broken, drugged, whispering for a gawd no one sent... he chose not to walk away.
He carried her to safety, but safety is never free.
And Jace doesn't offer kindness.
He makes deals.
Now Evelyn wears a ring she didn't choose and lives in a penthouse with a man who doesn't flinch when she bleeds.
One year, one lie, one contract marriage to end a scandal or so she thought.
No love, no trust, no touching.
Just a name on paper and a promise that this ends in winter.
But winter doesn't wait, and neither does the man who tried to buy her.
Because power doesn't like to lose its favorite possession, and even if Jace owns the contract, someone else still wants the girl.
The mask was supposed to protect her, now, it may be the only thing keeping her alive.