Their families built an empire on whiskey, blood, and a hundred-year-old lie.
Loving each other could burn it all down.
Genevieve Landry has spent her life perfecting the whiskey that might finally buy her freedom from the criminal family determined to own her. She has a hidden distillery, a secret company, and a plan to turn generations of moonshine into something legitimate. Then a Landry shipment disappears in disputed water, and Gen finds Bastien Cormier waiting at the scene. He’s the one man she should fear most.
Bastien is his family’s weapon, a ruthless enforcer raised to protect Cormier territory and punish anyone who threatens it. Gen should be just another Landry to him: an enemy, a weakness, a name carved into the wrong side of an old feud. Instead, he sees the same hunger in her that’s been eating through him.
When planted evidence pushes both families toward war, Gen and Bastien form a secret alliance to uncover who is engineering the bloodshed. Their search leads through drowned cypress groves, hidden stills, corrupt raids, and ancestral records someone is willing to kill to possess. It also leads them into each other’s arms.
Every stolen meeting makes them harder to separate. Every act of trust becomes a betrayal of blood. And when Bastien commits an unforgivable act against her family, desire won’t be enough to save them. He’ll have to prove the violent man who helped build her cage is willing to destroy his own inheritance to set her free. Because the feud between the Landrys and Cormiers began with a stolen promise. And Gen and Bastien may be the only ones dangerous enough to keep it.
A dark Southern Gothic crime romance featuring rival moonshine dynasties, forbidden enemies-to-lovers heat, a possessive morally gray enforcer, a brilliant distiller heroine, family betrayal, buried secrets, open-door spice, and a hard-won HEA.
