Chapters of Control

She was brilliant. Bankrupt. Desperate.When disgraced archivist Harper Vale accepts a lucrative offer to catalog the private library of reclusive historian Silas Blackwood, she believes she's stumbled into salvation. A remote gothic estate. Sixty-two thousand rare volumes. A salary too generous to question.She should have questioned it.The estate is isolated. The contract is airtight. And every night at midnight, the library doors lock from the outside.Silas Blackwood doesn't collect books. He collects people. Six months before Harper set foot on his estate, he sat in the back row of her lecture and decided she was the rarest acquisition he'd ever seen. Then he dismantled her life — piece by piece, credential by credential — until the only door left open led directly to him.Inside the Blackwood Library, electricity is a privilege. Food is earned. Light is currency. And the only man who holds the key is the same man who destroyed everything she had — so he could become everything she needs.Harper is no fool. She recognizes the architecture of her own captivity. She can name every stage of the conditioning, diagram every manipulation, trace the Pavlovian logic that links his voice to her relief and his absence to her agony.Knowing doesn't help.Because the library is a cathedral. The collection is extraordinary. And the man who locked her inside it sees her mind — truly sees it — in a way no one in the outside world ever did.Now Harper must decide what terrifies her more: the locked door, or the fact that she's stopped trying to open it.