Vicious

Ten years ago, Emilia LeBlanc was the housekeeper's daughter at the Spencer family estate, and Baron "Vicious" Spencer was the heir who made her teenage years a calculated nightmare before she escaped to New York to build a life as a painter. The day-job temp agency sends Emilia into the Spencer Corp penthouse as a personal stylist, and Vicious recognizes her instantly. He buys her contract, moves her into his apartment, and starts the grudge over from the beginning, except this time Emilia refuses to flinch. Shen writes the Sinners of Saint series opener with the morally grey-hero, enemies-to-lovers, banter-as-foreplay template that the BookTok dark-contemporary canon spent the next eight years rebuilding from.