Shattered Alignment: A Dark Romance by N.A. Sterling

She saves buildings. He exposes lies. Neither of them knows how to be saved.Architectural restorer Sloane Adler has spent two years rebuilding her life after escaping eighteen months of psychological abuse. She works alone. She checks the locks. She trusts stone more than people — because stone doesn't lie about what it is.Then she meets Hayes Brennan at a gallery opening in Philadelphia. He's a fraud examiner — a man trained to find the distance between what something appears to be and what it actually is. He carries his own damage. His own defenses. His own reasons for standing near the exit.They recognize each other instantly. Not by name. By pattern.As Sloane fights to restore a condemned chapel in the Callowhill neighborhood, she discovers that the man who broke her and the woman who broke Hayes were not strangers to each other. The same phrase. The same method. The same architecture of control.Now the question is no longer whether she can trust Hayes. The question is whether she can stop letting the man who destroyed her make every decision — including the decision to love again.