

Three years ago, I drugged the mafia heir, Vincent. After that one wild night, he didn’t kill me. Instead, he fucked me until my legs went weak, gripping my waist and whispering the same word over and over: “Principessa.” Just as I was about to propose, his first love, Isabella, returned. To keep her happy, Vincent let a car hit me, had my mother’s heirlooms thrown to stray dogs, and sent me to prison… But when I was finally broken, flying to Boston to marry someone else, Vincent tore New York City apart to find me.

As the only daughter of the Merrick family, Kirsty Merrick bears the responsibility of marrying into the prestigious Bartley family to lead the Merrick family to new heights, as carefully orchestrated by her mother Evanna Taylor. Kirsty successfully secures a betrothal with Morgan Bartley, the playboy son of the Bartley family's second heir. Unknown to Kirsty, Morgan has been secretly involved with Jess Merrick, Kirsty's only friend who grew up with her in an orphanage. Years later, when brought back to the Merrick family, the kindhearted Kirsty could not bear to abandon Jess, and thus pleaded with her parents to take Jess in as well. Now, Jess has begun an affair with Kirsty's fiance Morgan. To get back at Morgan, Kirsty designs a plan to seduce and intoxicate Nicolai Bartley, the young CEO of the Bartley Group, leading to the start of a dangerous "underground affair."

Reality-warping anomalies descend on the world, and with them comes a lethal labyrinth of survival rules that no one fully understands. Mia Townsend, a former homicide detective, now reborn into the body of a seventeen-year-old school girl, is selected as a national representative and sent into the trials.Where everyone else fixates on simply not dying, Mia refuses to think that small. She brings a detective's precision to each forbidden prohibition, treating every rule not as a wall but as a riddle with a seam running through it. Layer by layer she peels back the lies, finds the life hidden inside each trap, and moves forward while the world around her stands frozen in fear. She isn't surviving the anomalies. She's outplaying them.