Wife of Record
- Dark Romance
- Forced Proximity
- Morally Gray
- Touch Her and Die
- Mafia
- Dark
- Suspenseful
- Marriage of Convenience
Ivy Sorel typed the trial that put Basile Arceneaux in Angola.
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The story
The story
Ivy Sorel typed the trial that put Basile Arceneaux in Angola. Months later his family wants her dead, and the man they paid to do it is sitting at her kitchen table, drinking her tea.
Anton Duquesne does not deny the contract. He offers her the only way out instead: a made man's wife is untouchable, and by Friday he means her to be his.
She says yes with a dead man cooling in her courtyard, the first to come for her. Anton puts a ring on her hand that fits like he measured it, because he did, and kisses her once at the altar, for the witnesses. Neither of them stops thinking about it.
He guards every door between her and the men who want her gone. She has spent her whole life needing nothing from anybody. That gets harder, married to a man who calls her wife like he means to keep the word.
A marriage of convenience with a body count, and a hitman who guards what he was paid to end.
Spice map
Where it gets hot
Heat, chapter by chapter. No spoilers, just warning.
The world
Know your way around
Character
- Anton Duquesne
- Thirty-eight, dark-haired, and very still. He let himself into Ivy's kitchen, made tea in her good mug, and told her the truth before she had to ask twice: he was paid to kill her, and he has already decided not to.
- Basile Arceneaux
- The man Ivy's shorthand helped convict. Three weeks of trial, twelve jurors, and a guilty verdict that sent him to Angola and put a price on the woman who wrote it all down.
- Ivy Sorel
- Twenty-seven, a court stenographer who typed the trial that sent a man to Angola. She is standing in her own kitchen, keys still in her fist, when she finds a stranger already sitting at her table, drinking out of her good mug.
Term
- Made man
- A man fully inducted into one of the old families, with the code's full protection behind his name, and his wife's. Anton is one. That is the entire proposal he brings to Ivy's kitchen table.
- The code
- The oldest rule the old families keep: a made man's wife is untouchable. Whoever lays a hand on her answers to every family in the city, the same night. It is the one door still standing between Ivy and the contract on her life.
- The contract
- The order placed on Ivy's life through the old families' own channel, open terms, no name attached to who is paying. It does not expire and it does not forget. It only changes hands, from one man willing to take it to the next.
Place
- Magnolia Street
- The street that anchors Ivy's neighborhood: her Tuesday grocery run, cash only, and, before the week is out, a block where men she has never met keep watch while a stranger sits in her kitchen.
Family
- The Arceneaux family
- The family whose son Ivy's shorthand convicted, and the first name every voice in the city reaches for when the contract on her life comes up. Whether the reach is correct is a different question.
Spoiler-safe. Only what you learn in chapter 1.
