Five Devils Built My Inferno

Five people ruined her. Not one of them thinks they did anything.

Clea Varga could look at a company and tell you, in four seconds, exactly who was lying. It made her the best forensic auditor alive. It did not save her.

In eleven days she lost everything; her firm, her name, her marriage. And when she went looking for the hand that did it, there wasn't one.

Just five people who each did one small, deniable, immaterial thing.

A husband who signed a page he didn't read.
A partner who stayed silent for one meeting.
A lawyer who drafted a lawful document.
A regulator who left one email unopened for nine days.
A sister who believed the convenient story.

Every one of them is innocent. Every one of them is guilty. Both are true, and the space between those two truths is where she was destroyed.

She can't punish them. The moment she does the disproportionate thing, she becomes the villain her ruin was missing, and they all go free. So Clea builds something colder than revenge: she will make each of them do the arithmetic she did. Look at the whole. And then she will stand back, in the cold, and let them refuse to see it.

There is only one problem with her reckoning.

Nine years ago, she did it too. To a bookkeeper named Anna Kesler; In four seconds, and she never learned her name.

The only man who believes she can come back is Joel, the junior who once refused to sign the same kind of finding, and lost everything for it, and teaches now at a small college forty minutes down a dark road. He will not build a wall against her. He will not lie to her about the load-bearing things. And he is the last warm thing in a book that knows the bottom of hell is not fire.

It's ice!!!

For readers of literary revenge fiction who want the reckoning earned — a slow-burn, closed-door love that costs something, a heroine who is guilty too, and an ending that refuses the easy justice you think you want.