The Devil's Plaything

He was the most brilliant psychiatrist she had ever met. He was also the most dangerous man she would ever know.

When Sophie Ashcroft walks into Dr. Damien Mercer's office after a devastating breakup, she believes she has finally found someone who truly understands her. He listens like no one has before. He sees past every wall she has built. He makes her feel, for the first time in her life, completely safe.

She has no idea that safety is exactly what he wants her to feel.

Behind the framed degrees and the leather couch and the calm, compassionate voice is a man who has been doing this for years. Selecting. Studying. Dismantling. He rewrites his patients' memories, cuts them off from everyone who loves them, and calls the whole thing devotion. When women try to leave, they disappear. When colleagues start asking questions, they stop asking.

Damien Mercer has never been caught. He has been charming his way out of every room for twenty years, and he intends to keep doing it.

What he does not know is that someone has been watching him.

For seven years, Miguel has moved through the building where Damien works. Invisible. Silent. Collecting the small true things that everyone else threw away. Shredded billing records. Discarded audio files. A dead woman's journal. He is not a detective. He is not a journalist. He is a father, and the daughter this man destroyed was twenty-three years old, and her suicide note said sorry on every page, and nobody believed him when he said it was murder.

He has been patient. He is almost done being patient.

Love Me Or Die is a dark, propulsive psychological thriller about coercive control, obsessive love, and the devastating cost of being believed. Told from inside the mind of a predator, with one quiet and determined man hunting him from the shadows, it is a story about what happens when the system fails the people it was built to protect, and the only justice left is the kind you build yourself, piece by piece, over seven years.

Content note: This novel contains coercive control, psychological abuse, gaslighting, murder, and depictions of suicide. Intended for mature readers.