I think I hate my husband, but I’m trying very hard not to. He leaves me for hours, days on end. His friends don’t know I exist, and even after three years of marriage, we’ve still never been intimate… Does he keep me close just so he can hurt me? So he can show me he owns me like my father used to? When I take him to therapy I expect it to help, even if I forced him into it, but that’s the true beginning of our end. My therapist makes me feel things my husband never has, watches me, thinks about me, worries for me, his blue eyes following wherever I go.

In my world, marriage is a transaction between two families. Nothing more. So, when the head of the Mancini crime family approaches me with an offer to marry his daughter in exchange for what I need to destroy my enemy, I accept. But when a woman I've never heard of shows up on the contract, questions arise. If forcing her hand in marriage is what it takes to get what I want, then so be it. A wife was never meant to be anything more than a business transaction. A means to an end.

Natalie Bennett has a plan: survive her big sister's Christmas Eve wedding, avoid her estranged father, and absolutely do not fall apart in front of the ex she walked away from...even if he does look annoyingly good in red velvet.

When Colorado elementary school teacher Ophelia Brody decides to ditch her divorced family for a Christmas in the sunshine state with her college roommate, she doesn't expect a mile-high meet cute to tailspin the entire trip. Frankie Casado is cocky, presumptuous, shameless—and just the right distraction from her depressing, fruitless dating life back home for a few weeks. It just so happens the retired fighter pilot is in somewhat of a rut of his own, and the circumstances around their coincidental meeting and unavoidable physical attraction are the perfect excuse for a festive fling.

What do you do when the killers come out to play? When it's hunt or be hunted? You sharpen your knives and prepare to get bloody because nobody does it better than a woman scorned with something to prove. Welcome to the 23rd annual serial killer war games, where the adrenaline runs high, the blood is fresh, and the revenge is best served cold.