She inherited a countess's title. She didn't inherit her secrets she has to steal them back. When art restorer Elena Voss is summoned to a notary's office in Vienna, she expects a small bequest from a great-aunt she never met. Instead, she walks out the Countess of Berhof heir to a crumbling palazzo on the Ringstrasse, a title erased from every record for seventy years, and a vault no one has opened since 1946.
She has one night to decide whether to accept it. That night, at the masked ball held to announce her, the diplomat who orchestrated her inheritance is found dead behind a locked door and the only witness who can clear her name is the one man she was warned never to trust. Damian Wolfe isn't the security consultant his card claims he is. He's been chasing a smuggling network that has moved looted paintings through respectable hands for three generations, and every trail leads back to the Berhof vault.
He needs what's inside it. She needs to know why her great-aunt hid it in the first place and why someone is now willing to kill for it. As the body count rises and Vienna's most trusted names start looking like suspects, Elena and Damian are forced into an alliance neither of them wants and both of them need one built on secrets, suspicion, and a pull neither can afford to name. To survive the season, she'll have to become exactly what her great-aunt was: a countess who knows precisely how to keep a secret, and precisely when to break one.
A masquerade. A murder. A love that could be the last mistake she ever makes.
She inherited a countess's title. She didn't inherit her secrets she has to steal them back. When art restorer Elena Voss is summoned to a notary's office in Vienna, she expects a small bequest from a great-aunt she never met. Instead, she walks out the Countess of Berhof heir to a crumbling palazzo on the Ringstrasse, a title erased from every record for seventy years, and a vault no one has opened since 1946.
She has one night to decide whether to accept it. That night, at the masked ball held to announce her, the diplomat who orchestrated her inheritance is found dead behind a locked door and the only witness who can clear her name is the one man she was warned never to trust. Damian Wolfe isn't the security consultant his card claims he is. He's been chasing a smuggling network that has moved looted paintings through respectable hands for three generations, and every trail leads back to the Berhof vault.
He needs what's inside it. She needs to know why her great-aunt hid it in the first place and why someone is now willing to kill for it. As the body count rises and Vienna's most trusted names start looking like suspects, Elena and Damian are forced into an alliance neither of them wants and both of them need one built on secrets, suspicion, and a pull neither can afford to name. To survive the season, she'll have to become exactly what her great-aunt was: a countess who knows precisely how to keep a secret, and precisely when to break one.
A masquerade. A murder. A love that could be the last mistake she ever makes.