For sixteen-year-old Seraphina Thorne, heiress to an industrial empire, a secluded willow grove is a secret sanctuary from her suffocating life of privilege. For Kaelen Vance, the intense and brilliant son of a factory foreman, it's a place of quiet refuge. It becomes the only place their two worlds can collide, where a shared passion for architecture and design ignites a forbidden romance built on stolen kisses and whispered dreams.

Their idyllic secret is shattered when a catastrophic fire at Thorne Industries tears their town apart, leaving Kaelen's father dead and a community baying for blood. In the chaotic aftermath, a cruel lie is spun, turning Kaelen's family into scapegoats for the tragedy. To save her, and to protect his father's honor from a devastating threat by her father, Kaelen makes an impossible choice: he vanishes, leaving Seraphina to believe he abandoned her in a heartless act of self-preservation. A decade later, the wound between them has festered into a deep and bitter hatred. Seraphina is now a successful architect, her heart shielded by impenetrable walls of cold resentment. Kaelen has forged his grief and rage into a billion-dollar empire and returned to Emberwood as a handsome, powerful, and predatory stranger.

He's back to claim his revenge through a hostile takeover of what remains of the Thorne legacy. His final, non-negotiable term: Seraphina must work for him. She is forced to become the lead architect on the redevelopment of the very land that holds their ghosts, trapped between fighting the man who destroyed her past and saving her family's future. Now, working together on the ashes of their history, every shared blueprint is a battlefield, and every glance is charged with ten years of unspoken pain and searing chemistry. But as they unearth the secrets of the past, Seraphina must confront a devastating truth-the boy she thought abandoned her may have sacrificed everything for her instead.