His Ruthless Touch

When Ashlyn Vaelith arrives at Blackmoor Estate, it is meant to be a temporary retreat from the city's cold ambitions—a place to escape, reflect, and disappear. But the mansion isn't just a shadowed relic of the past. Its walls breathe memory, its halls conceal legacy, and its master, Lucien Thorne, is not a man to welcome strangers without reason. Lucien is calculated, unreadable, and bound by something far older than fortune or fame. Beneath his cold exterior lies a web of secrets tied to an ancestral pact, a family name cursed to protect what should never be remembered. Ashlyn, unknowingly entangled in the bloodlines that fuel this legacy, becomes the one piece that doesn't fit—and the only one that can break it. As the estate's silences grow louder and the truth begins to fracture around them, Ashlyn must decide whether to confront the fire that made her or surrender to the game that defines him. In a world where control is inherited and desire is its own kind of war, not every bond is meant to be broken. Set against a backdrop of gothic grandeur and buried truths, this is a story of power, memory, and the quiet collision of two ruthless hearts.