Standalone Volume

The Havana Frame: A Legacy in Shadows

By Vivienne Ashcroft

Quick Summary

Twenty years ago, Ernesto Reyes was branded a traitor and died in disgrace. His daughter has spent her whole life restoring other people's masterpieces and avoiding the one truth she was never brave enough to face.

Twenty years ago, Ernesto Reyes was branded a traitor and died in disgrace. His daughter has spent her whole life restoring other people's masterpieces and avoiding the one truth she was never brave enough to face.

When the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes summons art conservator Elena Reyes back to the city that destroyed her father's name, she tells herself it's only a job. Then she finds his handwriting hidden inside the frame of the very painting she's been sent to restore: a confession that could clear him completely, or get her disappeared the same way he was.

She isn't alone in the dark workshop for long. Mateo Duarte says he's a cultural-heritage liaison. He is not. He's Cuban intelligence, assigned to watch her and the only man in Havana who might already know exactly what her father died trying to expose.

As Elena and Mateo trace a decades-old smuggling operation through looted colonial art, forged diplomatic seals, and a gallery director who has been keeping her father's secrets since before Elena was born, the two of them fall into something neither can afford: a partnership that becomes a romance, inside a conspiracy that has already killed once to stay buried.

With one week, one letter, and one chance to expose the truth in front of the very men who built their power on her father's disgrace, Elena has to decide how much of her carefully controlled life she's willing to burn down for a man she was ordered to watch, and a confession that was never supposed to survive.