She always dies. He always fails. The devil always wins-until now. Lily Ashcombe wakes in her Fifth Avenue drawing room with no memory of drowning...only a bone-deep terror of cold water and a first-class ticket on the RMS Elysium, the "unsinkable" ocean liner everyone else is dying to board. An arranged marriage, a glittering voyage, a black sea that makes her skin crawl-she tells herself it's just nerves. Below decks, engineer and cardsharp Tom Riley owes his life to a man who doesn't age, doesn't blink, and doesn't lose. Mr. Black-Mephisto when he's not pretending to be human-once dragged Tom from a wreck and wrote his name in a leather ledger. Now he's calling in the debt: when disaster strikes the Elysium, one titled lord must die, one society heiress must live...or the loop begins again. From the moment Lily quite literally crashes into Tom on deck, the script starts to unravel. She dreams of his hand ripping from hers in icy water. He sees flashes of other ships, other nights, the same girl sinking every time. And everywhere they turn, Mephisto is already there: changing uniforms, changing faces, never changing the ring on his finger-or the rules of his game. As the Elysium cuts into a glass-still Atlantic and ice warnings are quietly ignored, Lily and Tom have three choices: Obey the bargain and lose each other. Save themselves and let strangers drown in their place. Or break the loop, defy the devil, and risk going down together-for good. Gilded ballrooms, doomed decks, a slow-burn, time-twisted romance, and a charming, utterly ruthless devil who is very tired of humans catching feelings. Gilded Hearts Afloat (Mephisto's Wager, Book One) is perfect for readers who love Titanic-level glamour, supernatural bargains, and "what if we're soulmates across lifetimes and the universe itself has to pry us apart."