Description
The Prade Contract (Evergreen Agency Series, Book 2)
The fashion industry was just the beginning. Now the hunt for traffickers moves into the shadows of the international art world.
Two years after exposing a massive fashion industry trafficking network, seventeen-year-old Marta Reyes has become the UN’s youngest specialist consultant on exploitation in creative industries. Her unique synesthesia—the ability to literally taste lies and see emotions in vivid colors—has made her invaluable to international investigations.
But when young artists begin vanishing through “exclusive residency programs” and “prestigious development opportunities,” Marta realizes the network didn’t just disappear after her Monaco triumph. It evolved.
The Prade Cultural Foundation offers everything ambitious artists dream of: world-class facilities, expert mentorship, and freedom from financial constraints. But behind the elegant facade lies a sophisticated trafficking operation that’s learned from past mistakes. No more crude kidnappings or obvious coercion—just carefully crafted contracts that transform artistic opportunity into systematic captivity.
To infiltrate the network, Marta must become Margot Delacroix, a synesthetic multimedia artist desperate for guidance and validation. Alongside her best friend Zoe—still recovering from her own trafficking trauma—she enters Paris’s elite Sorbonne arts program where recruiters are actively hunting their next targets.
What begins as straightforward documentation spirals into a nightmare when Dr. Heinrich Krause resurfaces. The architect of the Monaco trafficking network was supposed to be in prison serving a life sentence. Instead, he’s rebuilt his operation with terrifying sophistication, and he’s been waiting for Marta to walk into his trap.
Suddenly the hunter becomes the hunted. Zoe is taken hostage. Eight talented students are marked for recruitment. And Marta must choose between maintaining her cover, saving her friend, or exposing an operation that spans continents and reaches into the highest levels of cultural institutions.
But the most dangerous revelation comes from an unexpected source: Vivienne Laurent, the elegant director of Prade Foundation, who offers Marta something she never expected—partnership. Not coerced cooperation, but genuine collaboration to reform a system that might be transformed from within rather than destroyed from outside.
As Marta races to decode communications hidden in textile patterns and rescue artists from facilities designed to look like paradise, she discovers that trafficking networks aren’t simple villains to be defeated. They’re complex systems with internal conflicts, competing philosophies, and the disturbing possibility of evolution toward something that might cause less harm while still serving exploitative purposes.
The Prade Contract plunges readers into the high-stakes world of fine arts trafficking, where beauty masks brutality and exclusive opportunities conceal systematic exploitation. With her synesthetic abilities pushed to their limits and impossible choices at every turn, Marta must decide: Can evil systems be reformed, or must they be destroyed entirely? And can she survive long enough to find out?
Perfect for fans of sophisticated YA thrillers that tackle real-world issues through pulse-pounding suspense. A gripping sequel that proves the fight against trafficking is never as simple as heroes versus villains—sometimes it’s about navigating impossible shades of gray to save lives any way you can.
“Smarter, darker, and more complex than the first book—Marta Reyes faces choices that have no good answers.”
“A thriller that respects both its teen protagonists and its readers’ intelligence.”
