Dante 'The Serpent' Moretti, heir to a brutal empire, needs a wife to secure his legacy. The solution is simple: a marriage alliance with the docile daughter of the city's powerful Prime Minister. He is a man who gets what he wants, and he expects a pawn. A beautiful, biddable bride to stand by his side as he rules the criminal underworld. But the woman who appears at the altar is not the socialite he was promised. She is TESA Qetsiyah, the family's hidden secret-a ghost with a brilliant mind and a thirst for vengeance that rivals his own. A phantom her father thought he'd long since buried, TESA is a master of disguise, a queen who built her own empire in the shadows. She is no one's pawn. What begins as a simple transaction spirals into a lethal game of psychological warfare. He is the serpent, obsessed with possessing the one woman who dares to defy him. She is the charmer, determined to burn his world to the ground to get the revenge she has spent a lifetime planning. But their hunt for dominance unearths a darker truth-a shared, tragic past that binds them together with secrets and blood. Their mothers were not strangers; they were the closest of friends, and their deaths were the foundation upon which their fathers' empires were built. In a world of lies, obsession is the only truth. But when the king of the underworld tries to cage a queen of the shadows, who is truly the one being trapped?