FOUR MINUTES FAST

She married a stranger to save her family's empire. She didn't know he'd spent twenty-two years building his to destroy it.

Vivienne Sabatino doesn't get surprised. As CFO of her family's shipping empire, she reads every contract twice, catches what everyone else misses, and has never once signed her name to something she hasn't fully understood.

Until her father tells her she's getting married. To a stranger. By Friday.

Raffaele Marchetti is New Orleans's most quietly powerful man. Self-made, unreadable, and in possession of exactly the terminal leases her family's company needs to survive. The marriage is a merger with a ring on it. Vivi negotiates it like one: separate rooms, an exit clause, a signature that means something.

What she doesn't negotiate for is the truth.

Rafe has spent twenty-two years assembling an empire for a single purpose. To get close enough to the Sabatino family to prove what they did to his father, and make them pay for it. Marrying their daughter was never supposed to be the hard part.

But somewhere between a hurricane evacuation, a house full of secrets in Mid-City, and a woman who hums two bars of a song she doesn't know she remembers, the plan stops being a plan. And when Vivi finds the one piece of evidence Rafe was never supposed to let her see, she's left holding the truth about both men who claimed to love her, and a choice neither of them can make for her.

Four Minutes Fast is the fifth and final book in the Broken Kingdoms series. Five stories about the marriages we enter with our eyes open, the families we protect past the point of reason, and what it costs to finally tell the truth.

Can be read as a standalone. No cliffhanger. Slow-burn, marriage-of-convenience romance with a body count.