They built her a cage of gold. She's going to burn it down.
Infamous thief Asha Sterling has one rule: survive. She's spent eighteen years hiding what she is — a psionic with a gift for pulling truth from lies and a trigger finger that never misses — in the destitute wards beyond Elysium City, where her kind are hunted, registered, and owned. She doesn't fight for causes. Causes got her parents killed. She fights for the found family she's built, survival, and one more day nobody finds out what she can do.
When a heist goes wrong, her blood gets sequenced, and the life she built out of lies collapses in an interrogation cell as she stares into the last face she wants to see–Danté Astraeius.
Danté is nephew to the tyrant who murdered his father and Commander of the Gold Corps, the unit that kills psionics like her on sight. Danté serves as judge, jury, and executioner for anyone unlucky enough to stand where Asha's standing now. She expects a death sentence. She gets an offer instead — serve him, or watch her crew die in her place.
She takes the deal and vows to despise him for it. It should be easy. He's cold, lethal, and built like every bad decision she's ever avoided making. Yet it proves a treacherously difficult task when Danté looks at her like she's a puzzle worth solving and the hate keeps combusting into something that feels a lot more like hunger.
The gilded world above the wards isn't what Asha was promised, and neither is the man who dragged her into it. Danté has spent years playing loyal dog to a monster, biding his time, building something Asha isn't supposed to know exists — and her gifts might be the only thing that can finish it. The line between hostage and ally blurs fast. The line between enemy and something far more dangerous blurs faster, until Asha can't tell anymore whether she wants Danté dead or wants him closer, whether the danger radiating off him is a warning or an invitation.
Asha didn't ask to be anyone's weapon. But some cages only open from the inside — and she's never been a damsel who’s waited to be saved.
A blood-soaked world of caste and cruelty. An explosive romance forged in violence and yearning.