She sees patterns in everything. Except the trap closing around her.
Charlotte Sinclair has spent her days in the quiet of her father’s study, where secrets live in ink and paper rather than in the eyes of men who would kill to keep them. When the Crown requires a codebreaker inside the Black Rose Society, she is the only one who can unravel the cipher that threatens Parliament itself. But infiltrating a treasonous network demands more than a brilliant mind. It demands a man of experience, nerve, and dangerous capability to keep them both alive.
Major Adrian Blackwood is precisely that man — spy, gentleman, and keeper of secrets he has never dared speak aloud. He needs her gift for ciphers. She needs his cover. Together, they will pose as sympathizers within the Society’s inner circle, navigating masked balls, forged documents, and midnight rendezvous along the fog-laden Thames.
What neither anticipated was a traitor within the Society determined to see them hanged for theft — or a blackmailer who knows precisely which ghosts will bring Adrian to his knees.
As they race to unmask a catastrophic plot against Parliament, their careful professional partnership begins to feel perilously like something more. With assassins on their trail, their reputations in ruins, and the Black Rose closing in from all sides, Charlotte and Adrian must expose the real villain before Westminster falls — and before the web of deception they have built together destroys everything they have come to hold dear.
In a world of shadows and shifting allegiances, the most dangerous secret is not the one their enemies carry.
It is the one they are keeping from each other.
Book 2 in The Shadow of the Black Rose — Victorian spy romance with intrigue, danger, and a love forged in the most unlikely of crucibles.
