Desolate Hearts - R.M. Black

He bought a ghost town. She was the final acquisition.

Clara Gallagher is broke, brilliant, and invisible. A struggling historian drowning in student debt, she accepts a dream contract: six months cataloging a restored ghost town in the Nevada desert for a reclusive billionaire. The pay is life-changing. The location is ninety-six miles from the nearest living soul.

Atlas Voss is not her employer. He is her architect.

For three years, he watched her. Tracked her groceries. Engineered her financial collapse. Eliminated every person and every option until the only door left open was his. The job is a lie. The isolation is a cage. And the desert - two hundred miles of burning silence in every direction - is the only lock he needs.

But Clara is not the passive subject his models predicted. She is a woman who catalogs her own captivity with archival gloves and a mechanical pencil. Who walks twelve miles into a lethal desert just to prove she can. Who finds a working radio, holds the transmit button under her thumb - and chooses not to press it.

Because the most terrifying thing about Atlas Voss is not what he took from her.

It is what he built in its place.

Desolate Hearts is a full-length standalone dark romance featuring a morally obsessive billionaire, a heroine who refuses to break, and a love story that never once pretends to be safe. This book contains themes of extreme isolation, psychological manipulation, omnipresent surveillance, captivity, and possessive behavior. Reader discretion is strongly advised.