How do you live when you’re used your whole life? When you’re just a beautiful toy, a lover with nothing of her own—even without the right to choose? Arina wants freedom, to have a family that the girl from an orphanage never had. But a run—an escape—will be followed by cruel punishment. Tikhon Pokrovsky had a taboo against unfree women—no intrigues. But it was precisely because of that taboo that he broke his own rules. She should have been let go the first time they met. He felt it—there would be nothing but trouble with her. But she hooked him. Bold, beautiful, broken by someone else. And also—someone else’s. A woman not his. Contains profanity.