He exiled her long ago. Now she’s the only one that can crack his cold heart. A desperate woman trades everything for a chance of escape. Penelope Willington is an innocent—innocent to a fault—and she never should have stepped foot into the rookeries, much less sought out the man that had once been her whole world—when she was ten. But that was a long time ago. Desperate times call for extraordinary actions, and Pen can’t afford to miss her one and only chance to find a future free of the vile man determined to force her under his thumb and into his bed. Her survival depended on his cruelty. After his parents died, Strider Hoppler was forced to exile the one other person in the world he loved—Penelope Willington. He did it to save Pen, did it cruelly, and he never once looked back. Not until sixteen years later, when she strolled into his lair in the heart of the East End of London.