{ "item_title" : "Cruel Mercy", "item_author" : [" Sloane James "], "item_description" : "Author's Note: Nobody dies violently in this book. Daniel Thorne has never raised his voice, let alone a weapon. His work is quieter than that: NDAs, settlements, the discreet conversion of inconvenient women into closed files. If you want a hero with blood on his knuckles, look elsewhere. If you want a man who could erase your entire existence with a fountain pen - and discovers he can't bring himself to sign... welcome to the machine. I'm the one who warned them. I watched a woman vanish into the Carew family and come out a countess. Then my best friend joined an Ashcombe's campaign, and I warned her: rich men with old houses come with machinery - solicitors, settlements, problems that quietly stop being problems. She walked in anyway. I was the sensible one. Then it sent a man to my hospital. I'm an A&E nurse. I walk toward the body on the floor - it's what I've done since I was fifteen, when the body was my brother's. So when two frightened girls arrive on my Friday shift with injuries that tell a story no one powerful wants told, and a solicitor appears in my corridor at 2am to collect a phone that isn't his, I don't look away. I read bodies for a living, and his stillness tells me exactly what he is. Daniel Thorne. The family fixer. The machinery I warned everyone about, wearing a good suit and a wedding ring that sits wrong on his hand. I should stop asking questions. I don't. So they send him to erase me - not with violence. With paperwork. Pressure. The polite dismantling of everything I am. Except what happens between us in a locked treatment room isn't in anyone's file. And afterwards, the man who has never failed to close a case can't finish mine. Now the machine is hunting us both, and the deeper I dig, the more women I find in its drawers - decades of them, paid and silenced and filed. The closer I get to the truth, the closer I get to him, until I can't tell whether I'm investigating the man or becoming his accomplice. I became a nurse because once, I didn't arrive in time. The terrifying thing about Daniel Thorne isn't what he can make disappear. It's what he's shown me about the mercy in my own hands - and who I'm willing to withhold it from. Cruel Mercy is a dark, high-heat enemies-to-lovers romance set in the institutional shadows of the English aristocracy. Book 3 in The Ashcombe Files. Can be read as a standalone. If you love the psychological warfare of L.J. Shen, the slow-burn tension of Danielle Lori, and the elite manipulation of Rina Kent, this is your next obsession.Enemies to lovers - she finds what's hidden, he makes it disappearShe warned her best friend about this family. Nobody warned her about the solicitor.Fixer hero - his weapons are paperwork, patience, and informationHe was sent to silence her and kept her insteadNurse heroine with a diagnostic eye and a dead brotherShe read his danger in ninety seconds. She stayed anyway.Dubious consent - survival and desire merge in a locked treatment roomForced proximity - hiding from the machine in his flatDark protector - touch her and your file closesHe falls first - she's the one problem his system can't solveA good woman who goes dark - and stays therePower inversion - she ends the book holding his pulseFemale friendship that survives what all three women becomeMorally dark hero who doesn't get redeemedReferences to crimes against minors (off-page, never depicted)Grief and sibling loss (overdose, backstory)Open door - danger sex, power sex, complicity sexAnne and Maria return - the trilogy ends with all three couplesHEA guaranteed", "item_img_path" : "https://covers4.booksamillion.com/covers/bam/9/79/818/104/9798181047075_b.jpg", "price_data" : { "retail_price" : "19.99", "online_price" : "19.99", "our_price" : "19.99", "club_price" : "19.99", "savings_pct" : "0", "savings_amt" : "0.00", "club_savings_pct" : "0", "club_savings_amt" : "0.00", "discount_pct" : "10", "store_price" : "" } }

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