CLEAN HANDS

Cellan built herself into someone unrecognizable — new name, new face, a career managing the financial lives of people with more money than conscience. It took six years. She is four months from finishing what she started.

Then she finds a body she didn’t make.

Before she can figure out who cleaned up her operation — before she can trace D. Rask to the Stamford apartment three blocks from her target, sit across from him for forty minutes deciding if he’s a problem or a resource, and walk out without answering — there’s a second chair at his table he put there before she knocked, a piece of intelligence he gives her that cost him something real to give, a sentence about her father that comes out before she decides to say it and a silence afterward that is the most careful thing anyone has done for her in six years, three months of working in the same operational space and running threat models on him every night that keep returning insufficient data, and the slow, dismantling realization that the man who has been cleaning up after her has been reading every page of her plan since before she wrote the first line.

She’s spent six years with one fixed point — no plan past the end of it, nothing on the other side worth building toward. He’s spent three years in suspension, watching a target he couldn’t move on, waiting for the situation to clarify — and then she walked into it and became the only variable he couldn’t route around.

Dark contemporary revenge romance for readers who want the morally grey heroine to be genuinely the most dangerous person in the room. The kind of book where the HEA lands and both of them are still dangerous and that’s exactly the point.

WHY THIS WILL SELL

→ Romance — Dark Romance (ID 334) sits at 27.4 sales-to-comp (Hot Cell) with 51 estimated daily sales per top 20 title — the highest ratio in all of Romance; structural tailwind on every unit sold

→ Dual-category play with Romance — Alpha Male (4.9, Hot Mainstream) gives legitimate positioning in a second high-volume category without compromising dark romance placement

→ Morally grey FMC is the most-searched, least-served combination in dark contemporary — no dominant title owns the “she’s the weapon, not the captive” lane at Tier 2

→ The stalker-hero inversion — he watches her plan, not her target — generates the organic BookTok comparison content that standalone trope executions don’t

→ Dark contemporary differentiates from the saturated mafia/bratva lane — Greenwich financial crime world is underrepresented at Tier 2 relative to reader demand

→ Dark Romance series readthrough runs 70–85% — 4-book Rask Files architecture with seeded leads from launch compounds revenue across every subsequent release

TROPES:

• Morally Grey Heroine
• Obsessive Stalker Hero
• Revenge Romance
• Hidden Identity / Constructed Persona
• He Falls First (She Finds Out Later)
• Predator/Prey — She’s Hunting; She Doesn’t Know She’s Also Hunted
• Slow Burn Collision
• He Cleans Up After Her Before She Knows His Name
• Only Soft for Her
• Touch Her and Die — Confirmed Chapter 27
• “You Were the Variable” — His Love Declaration
• The Second Chair Was Already There
• Surveillance as Intimacy
• Morally Grey Everyone

HEAT LEVEL: Open Door / Extreme Spice*
*includes guide to change heat levels if desired

Perfect for fans of: L.J. Shen, Rina Kent, Neva Altaj, and Gabrielle Sands.