The Debt Beneath the Roses

When sharp-tongued florist MARA VOSS discovers her late father secretly signed away her family's century-old greenhouse estate to settle a gambling debt, she has seventy-two hours to repay an impossible sum before the property is seized. Her only lifeline arrives in the form of NIKOLAI CRANE, a coldly elegant fixer who operates in the city's shadow economy and offers to absorb the debt in exchange for Mara posing as his fiancée at a high-stakes inheritance summit. What begins as a transactional arrangement unravels fast: Nikolai's estranged family harbors a decades-old secret that connects directly to Mara's father's disappearance years before his death, and someone inside the summit is willing to kill to keep that secret buried. Mara must navigate treacherous alliances, a fake engagement that starts feeling dangerously real, and the creeping realization that her father may not have been the victim she always believed. With the estate, the truth, and both their lives on the line, Mara and Nikolai must decide how much they are willing to expose — and how much they are willing to lose — before the final rose is cut.