Beneath The Knife

She could name a predator from across a room. She married one - and never once saw the blade.

Dr. Katie Fitzwilliam-Blackwell built an entire career on seeing. Manipulation. Coercion. The slow erasure of a woman inside her own marriage. She had a name for all of it, and a soft leather chair where she taught other wives to trust the alarm ringing in their heads.

Then every night she drove home to a man she couldn't read at all.

From the outside, her life with surgeon Dr. Daniel Blackwell is the prize at the end of all that striving - the gated house, the diamonds, the magazine spread with their names printed underneath. From the inside, it's a stage somebody forgot to turn the lights off on. And the morning Katie finds an emerald earring in a closet it has no business being in, the flawless world Dan built begins to show its seams.

What she uncovers isn't an affair. It's worse. Behind the black glass of a tower off the Strip, her husband is protecting something far more dangerous than a marriage - and a woman who starts asking the wrong questions is a woman who becomes inconvenient.

But Dan miscalculated two things. Years of knowing exactly how a predator works. And a circle of women who will not let her go under - a soldier who goes tactical from a base she has no business leaving, a lawyer who picks Katie over a client, a voice on the phone that says, every single time, I believe you.

And one woman she hasn't met yet. Kind eyes, quiet hands - the woman who walks in through the door grief left open and teaches Katie that being seen doesn't have to cost her everything.

To get out alive, Katie will have to do the one thing she spent her whole life helping other women do: stop asking the room what it sees - and finally look for herself.

You cannot be saved by anyone who needs you to stay asleep.

So she woke up.

Book 6 of 9 - free with Kindle Unlimited.

Content note: coercive control and gaslighting; medical abuse and non-consensual procedures; financial abuse; a character's disappearance (resolved); and one explicit, consensual love scene between women.