Gideon's Sacred Prey

At Saint Veronica’s, Noemi hides thirty-seven dollars in a missal and carries forty thousand dollars of her late father’s debt.

A man in a black coat has watched her pray from the last pew for twenty-nine mornings, never showing his face, until a gold key and a handwritten card turn up in her room and her most private thoughts no longer seem hers alone.

The watcher is Gideon Valcourt, ruler of a New Orleans criminal empire, and he did not come to church for forgiveness; for three years he has been buying the roof over her bed, the bishop’s debt, and the people who promised to keep her safe.

He already knows what she has tried to conceal, including how badly she wants the man she should fear.

When his enemies realize what she means to him, the church can no longer shield her, and the closer she comes to a man who has never pretended to be good, the more she wonders whether she wanted saving—and what she might become inside the cage he built.