A widowed intelligence agent and a quiet physician are assigned to protect a young prince from the Black Rose Society’s final strike—but as they race to unmask the Raven’s shocking identity, the greatest threat to each of them may be the feelings they’ve spent months refusing to name.
To protect a prince, they must become his guardians. To stop a conspiracy, they must trust each other with everything.
The Black Rose Society has turned its sights on the Crown’s most vulnerable target—young Prince Albert Edward—and the Queen’s spymaster needs his best agents in place before the Society strikes. Lady Arabella Langley, a widowed intelligence operative who has buried her grief beneath an armor of ruthless competence, is assigned to lead the prince’s protection. She needs a partner she can trust. What she gets is Dr. Sebastian Ramsey: steady, brilliant, and entirely too perceptive for her comfort.
Sebastian has spent his life proving his worth through usefulness—patching wounds, saving lives, asking nothing in return. He will keep the prince safe. He will outwit the Society’s operatives. What he will not do is become a liability to a woman who has already lost too much to a man who put duty before survival.
But as Arabella and Sebastian navigate the idyllic grounds of Osborne House—where sun-dappled gardens conceal shadows and a seemingly benevolent lady of charity raises their deepest suspicions—their professional partnership begins to feel dangerously like something more. A conspiracy three books in the making is racing toward its shattering conclusion. The Raven’s true identity will finally be unmasked, and the enigmatic Shadow’s loyalties will be revealed at last.
Racing against time on the Isle of Wight and in the drawing rooms of London, Arabella and Sebastian must shield a restless young prince, expose a traitor hiding in plain sight, and reckon with the truth that neither of them can outrun: that the greatest danger isn’t the enemy they’re hunting—it’s learning to let someone worth keeping choose to stay.
Book 3 in The Shadow of the Black Rose series—and the explosive series finale. All secrets are revealed. All threads are resolved. And two people who survived everything finally choose each other.
