CONSTRUCTO

He spent twenty-three years making himself unreachable.

She spent nineteen learning to disappear.

São Paulo had other plans.

When Ethan Cole, Manhattan's most precise corporate consultant, is forced to share an office with Maya Heyes, the one analyst whose methodology challenges everything he's built his reputation on, he expects a professional disagreement.

He does not expect her to be right.

Hired by opposing factions of the same collapsing Brazilian conglomerate, they have ninety days, one deadline, and a contractual requirement to produce a unified recommendation. Same floor. Adjacent desks. No exit.

Maya reads organizations the way other people read faces, loyalty, resentment, broken promises no spreadsheet captures. Ethan turns human complexity into elegant, defensible numbers. By every measurable standard, they are incompatible.

Except for the wound they share, which neither has ever named out loud.

As São Paulo pulls them deeper into each other's orbit, late nights in a glass-walled war room, an argument about a six-year-old restructuring reopens something neither expected, the real threat stops being the board or the deadline. It becomes what happens when two people who mastered being unseen finally see each other.

CONSTRUCTO: The Dark Maze is a slow-burn enemies-to-lovers thriller set against São Paulo's corporate world for readers who want romance to cost something.

For fans of "The Silent Patient", "The Love Hypothesis", and "Twisted Love".