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Summary
You moved to New York for your boyfriend’s promotion, traded a nearly-guaranteed senior track at the ACLU for a junior slot at NYCLU, and told yourself that love was worth the pay cut, the skyline, and the late nights spent alone with your cat and your motions to reopen.
On your thirty-first birthday, you chose a wine bar, good fries, and a stranger in a vest with sharp eyes, sharper questions, and a habit of insisting you text him when you get home. What you didn't know was: he was Rafael Barba, Sex Crimes ADA, point of contact for an NYPD trafficking task force that just pulled a dozen undocumented girls out of hell and handed their A-numbers to ICE.
Forced to work together to keep your clients out of detention and off deportation flights, you and Rafael become an uneasy alliance: his prosecution, your protection, his rules, your ethics, his temper, your rage.
It would be easier if the only thing on the line were a case. But you’re sharing witnesses, strategy, and late nights with a man who keeps choosing your clients’ safety over convenience, keeps bending for you even when he’s furious, and keeps calling you “Counselor” like it’s both a challenge and a confession.