Book excerpt: Set against the backdrop of Victorian London's dangerous East End, a young woman's disappearance brings together a wounded war veteran and the one woman who can see beyond his scars. As a probationary nurse at Whitechapel’s Samaritan Hospital, Ada Hamilton is required to remain unmarried and devote her energies to helping those in need, but when her sister goes missing, she becomes obsessed with solving the mystery of her disappearance. A menacing aristocrat may hold the answers, but it is his friend, scarred Afghan War veteran William Selsby, a man with questionable intentions and haunting grey eyes, who may hold the key to her heart. William Selsby returned wounded and broken from Afghanistan to find his betrothed married to another man. Eight years later, desperate for a woman’s touch, he accepts a wager from a debauched nobleman, winning the chance to take the man’s mistress off his hands. But the woman he encounters in Whitechapel overturns all his expectations and may be the one person who can see something worth cherishing in the man he has become, wounds and all.