Shielded by Shadows
"I survived death once. Now I'm living with the one man who could destroy me completely."
Vivienne Ashford's life ended the night someone put three bullets through her limousine window.
The attempt on her life should have killed her, would have killed her, if she hadn't leaned forward at exactly the right moment to retrieve her dropped phone. Instead of attending her own funeral, she woke up in a private hospital with her face plastered across every news outlet and one terrifying question: who wants her dead?
The answer, she's told, lies buried in her family's past. Her late father, Theodore Ashford, built an empire on luxury real estate, but the Ashford fortune allegedly conceals decades of money laundering, blackmail, and connections to New York's most dangerous crime families. Vivienne knew none of this. She was the perfect socialite daughter, beautiful, poised, and completely ignorant of the rot beneath her family's golden reputation.
Now, that ignorance has nearly cost her everything. Her stepmother Patricia has seized control of the Ashford empire, her half-brother Marcus has turned the board against her, and her fiancé Julian, the man she loved for five years, publicly announced their engagement was "a mistake" three days after the shooting. He's now seen everywhere with Vivienne's former best friend, Claire Donovan, who's been giving interviews about how "Vivienne was always unstable, obsessed with status."
Stripped of her position, her reputation destroyed, and still healing from her wounds, Vivienne is assigned a bodyguard by the FBI: Damian Cross.
He's everything she despises. Cold. Ruthless. Working-class. A former Marine sniper turned private security specialist who treats her like a spoiled princess playing victim. He invades her space, controls her schedule, sleeps in the room next to hers, and has the audacity to tell her when she's being "stupidly reckless." He never smiles, never softens, and looks at her with those dark, unreadable eyes like he can see every shallow, useless thing about her.
But Damian has his own secrets. His younger sister was killed five years ago in a hit-and-run that was never solved. The driver was never found. The case went cold. And Damian has spent every day since hunting for answers, following a trail that keeps leading back to one name: Theodore Ashford.
Forced to live in close quarters as the threats escalate, Vivienne begins to crack under Damian's scrutiny—and discovers she's not the weak, decorative creature everyone believed her to be. She has her father's intelligence, his strategic mind, and a fury that's been dormant for twenty-six years. As she digs into her family's empire, she uncovers evidence that the assassination attempt wasn't random. It was a silencing.
Someone knows what her father did. Someone knows what Vivienne accidentally inherited. And someone will kill anyone who threatens to expose the truth.