Weight of Timber

He built her a home. He made it a cage.Sutton Mercer is broke, desperate, and one bad month away from disappearing entirely. When she inherits a half-built house on a remote lot in rural Virginia, she sees her only way out — finish the build, sell the property, start over.There's just one problem. Every contractor in town refuses the job.Except him.Kaelen "e;Kael"e; Vance is a massive, silent carpenter with scarred knuckles and a reputation that makes grown men cross the street. The town calls him a pariah. A monster. The man who put two brothers in the hospital with his bare fists and walked away without a scratch.He agrees to finish her house for almost nothing. His only condition: he controls the site. His tools. His schedule. His rules.Sutton tells herself she can handle him.She's wrong.When a brutal storm destroys her trailer — her last safe haven — Kael is already waiting. He's built a room inside the framing of her house. Warm. Insulated. One door. One mattress. And him, sleeping between her and the only exit.Night after night, wall by wall, nail by nail, Kael constructs something far more dangerous than a house. He isolates her from the town. Provides everything she needs. Makes himself the only source of warmth, safety, and the kind of devastating physical attention that rewires her body until she can't remember what it felt like to sleep without his weight beside her.By the time Sutton discovers the truth — that the storm didn't destroy her trailer, that he did, that every locked door and disconnected battery was calculated — it's already too late.Not because she can't leave.Because she doesn't want to.