Their Hollow King

Kingsley Beaumont

From the moment I could walk, I was meant to be a king.

The authority, the organization, even the woman I was promised to. It has always been mine. 

But that came to a halt the day my fiancé was murdered before me at the altar. 

She died, and a part of me died with her, leaving behind nothing but a pathetic shell of myself and a sorry excuse for the man I used to be.

It's been a year since that day, and now I've been assigned to work with a new hire at my family's hotel chain. A hot-headed, beautifully inked, dangerously attractive man who has no business being anywhere near my world: Rip Wright. 

I should be focused on the mole infiltrating my family's empire, not babysitting the new social media manager.

And yet, there's something about him. Something in the way he forces me to react, to feel, in ways no one else ever has. 

And I have a feeling he's going to make me regret feeling anything at all.

Rip Redgrave

I always protect my family.

I take the jobs no one else wants. The ones that end in threats, blood, and broken bones. I don't mind. I've always had a temper, and I've never been afraid to use it.

So being sent undercover to infiltrate an opposing organization, posing as a boring social media hire while gathering intel on a quiet mafia prince who's been out of the public eye for a year, is not exactly what I'm used to. 

Kingsley Beaumont is nothing like me. He is dry, detached, and doesn't lash out when he absolutely should. I don't get it. How is someone like him supposed to inherit an empire when he won't even stand up for who he is?

But the more I watch him, the less sense he makes. There's something beneath all that silence, and the longer I stay, the harder it is to remember why I came here in the first place.

Because I definitely wasn't sent here to protect him. 

Or make him mine.