Noelle built her whole escape plan around a lie: invent a pedigree, attach herself to the gentler son of a powerful family, disappear from the rust-belt life that's been draining her since her masterwork was stolen and sold by the people who were supposed to love her. Julian is kind, manageable. The plan is straightforward. Then his older brother Garrison marks her as a fraud in the first thirty seconds.
What Garrison doesn't do is expose her—at least not right away. He watches instead, and what he sees keeps not matching what he expected: she redesigns a ruined gown on the spot, deflects a socialite's cruelty with precision, works with her hands in ways no dynasty heir ever would. When he digs back through the archives and finds the original design that was stolen from her, his calculated surveillance breaks into something else entirely.
