Roman Mercer builds beautiful things. It’s the one clean thing his family has—Chicago money, honest money, a name that’s supposed to mean something. So when a commission calls him to Kansas City to restore a building no one’s touched in a hundred years, he takes it. It’s just brick and bone and forgotten blueprints.
Then he meets the woman who hired him.
Siobhan Kavanagh runs the legitimate face of a family that keeps its other faces well hidden. She reached for the Mercer name on an instinct she can’t explain—something about it older than either of them. She knows the rule her family has about names like his: leave them be. She’s breaking it a little more every day he’s in the building.
But the deeper Roman reads the old plans, the less the family’s sweet story matches the walls. A wrong date. A sealed room. A century of silence with a shape to it.
Some debts were never meant to be paid. Some were never meant to be found.

