The Villain Was Right

Jade Monroe was twenty-eight when Diana Reyes turned her into Scandal Villa's most-hated contestant of all time. The villain edit became a meme. The career evaporated. Four years later, Jade lives in a one-bedroom apartment in West Hollywood, works retail at a vintage clothing store on Melrose, and still types her own name into Google like she's pressing on a bruise. The autocomplete still knows what the world wants to hear about her.

Then her agent calls with real good news. The Monroe Foundation — the survivor-platform Sienna Cross is launching — wants Jade. Not as a survivor, not as a project, not as a charity case. As a co-architect. The catch: Jade has to walk back into the public conversation. On her own terms, on her own narrative, with the kind of strategic communication that requires a fixer who knows what he's doing.

Declan Cross runs the most discreet PR firm in Los Angeles. He's also Sienna Cross's brother, the man who's spent four years trying to atone for not being able to save his sister, the architect of a Foundation that is, in the most fundamental sense, his apology to a woman the world destroyed. Now his sister has handed him Jade Monroe's case file, and the woman in front of him is the woman he's been studying as a story for four years — and somehow, in a vintage shop on Melrose, she becomes the woman he can't stop wanting to know.

The job is professional. The contract is signed. The rebrand has a timeline. The problem is that Jade Monroe doesn't want to be saved. She wants to be heard. And Declan, who has built a career managing other people's narratives, has to learn the difference.

By the time the Foundation premiere arrives, the real reveal won't be Jade Monroe's rehabilitation. It'll be what she chooses to do with the microphone, on her own terms, in her own voice — and whether the man who couldn't save his sister is brave enough to let her.

THE VILLAIN WAS RIGHT is Book 7 in the Scandal Villa series — a BookTok-native, dual-POV, high-heat redemption romance about the cost of being misunderstood and the love that arrives when someone finally listens. Standalone HEA. Full series available.

Tropes you'll find inside: - Cancelled-then-vindicated heroine - PR fixer hero with a sister-shaped wound - Enemies-to-lovers / professional-to-personal - Forced proximity, dual POV - Industry insider critique - Crossover with Book 8 (Sienna Cross is Declan's sister) - High heat (9/10) earned through trust - HEA guaranteed

For readers who love a heroine who takes back the narrative, a hero who learns to actually listen, and stories about the women the internet got wrong.