The Apex Holdings Series

Ivy Sinclair runs on discipline. The scholarship that pays for her training, her apartment, the tower she lives in, the life she rebuilt after the last one broke her, comes with exactly one rule she trusts: never let a gift make you forget to ask why.

Killian Steele owns the tower. He owns the program. And when he offers her an arrangement no scholarship covers, precise, consensual, entirely on his terms, asking why stops being simple.

He built an empire on control. She survived on it. Neither of them planned for what happens when the man across the table stops running the play and starts telling the truth.

Some doors, once opened, never close the same way.

Josie Reyes has ten years of seat time nobody ever witnessed. Regionals won at fifteen. A father who thinks she quit at thirteen. A used kart under a bedsheet in a Hialeah garage. She races frontage roads at one in the morning, because that is the only track that ever let her in.

Then Killian Steele's people put a real car under her hands and offer her the one thing she has never had: a program, in daylight, with her name on the list.

There is always a catch. He hands it to her on day one and lets her decide whether to use it.

The fastest way to quiet a room is a name. Hers is Reyes, and she is about to make them all say it.

Katherine Winters built her whole life herself, from a loud girl in a quiet Utah house to a pastry chef who owns every room she walks into. She stopped waiting for a man years ago, for one simple reason: she will not be the one who slows down.

Then she hands a cake box to the nearest idle man at an engagement party, mistakes a billionaire for the caterer, and gets the one thing she stopped believing existed, someone who never asks her to be smaller.

Killian Steele has spent a lifetime keeping the truth locked away. Katherine is the first person he has wanted to hand the key.

More than average. It was always the only test that mattered.