Proxy

She was made to be a weapon. He was built to steal her soul.

AURA
Fourteen years ago, my mother broke me in a cold room to see if I could hold a secret.
I am the Zalt Consortium’s greatest achievement: a human dead-zone. I was trained to be a fortress of silence, a blade that feels no heat, a woman whose mind is a void the empathic Empri can never reach. I spent my life becoming a weapon that would never be turned.
Then he walked into my life.
Ethan Eames. A half-alien chameleon with eyes like shifting storms and a silver tongue that has dismantled empires. The man the Torrences traded like currency. The man who reads every desire I’ve buried and mirrors them back until I don’t know where the lie ends and I begin.
The man who is my husband by contract, and my ruin by choice.
Now we’re trapped in the heart of a political web: bound by a marriage alliance where the rooms are too small and his presence is an anchor I never asked for. My walls. My silence. The hunger I’ve locked away so tight it should be dead.
It’s not dead.
And when the anomalies open, when the stars turn wrong and the past comes screaming back, I’ll have to choose: my duty or my heart. The cage or the sky.
Him or nothing.

ETHAN
I have lived a thousand lives, and every one of them was a lie.
I am the perfect operative. I read the room, I find the crack, and I become the thing that opens it. I’ve spent a decade infiltrating the most dangerous family in the sector, but no one ever taught me how to read a woman who is a featureless blank.
I can’t find her seams. I can’t feel her win.
I was sold to Aura Zalt to settle a blood debt, and she looks at me like I’m a complication she’s calculating how to solve. She put a psychic suppressor on my neck just to see if I would bleed. I let her do it because I’ve never seen anything as beautiful as her reach.
But I can see her through my training; the steel, the secrets, and underneath it all, the thing she’s trying to kill and can’t: she’s starting to want me.
I’m not running this time. Not when the Consortium circles. Not when traitors move in the dark. Not when the woman who was built to be a weapon is the only thing keeping me from the void.
Some secrets are meant to stay buried.
This one is going to set us on fire.

Proxy is the third book in the Gravity of Sin series and features a conditioned heroine who feels nothing, a chameleon hero who feels everything, and a marriage of convenience in a high-stakes galactic war. This book has a complete romantic arc but continues the overarching series plot.