Debt at the Edge of Midnight

by Willa Bishop

Heat 3 / 5Novella · 12 chapters30,754 words2h 14m read~3h 25m listen

Odette Sloan has learned to wear grief like a second skin. Three years hosting velvet booths and swallowing secrets for the Blackridge syndicate have made her invisible — which is exactly why the family chose her for tonight. A frozen Lake Michigan hangar. A silent luxury jet going nowhere. And one ruthless fixer named Caius Ghent already waiting in the rear cabin like a loaded weapon with nowhere to point.

When the hangar doors grind shut and a cream envelope surfaces on the cockpit yoke, the message inside is unmistakable: a joint debt note, both their names, and a penalty clause timed to dawn. Their encrypted orders are contradictory. The keys are gone. And someone inside Blackridge has wired this ghost-flight cage with Odette’s dead lover as the bait and Caius’s life as the acceptable loss.

They are enemies by design — the family’s disposable knife and its most loyal ghost. But as sleet hammers the metal roof and the night deepens into confession, they begin to see the shape of a trap built for two. Caius is colder than the tarmac and twice as dangerous. Odette is done grieving men who let the syndicate write their endings.

MafiaEnemies To LoversMorally Grey