Sabina Antonescu has come to Andrei Vasilescu’s door under a name that is not her name, on the strength of a debt that is not really her father’s, with a story she has rehearsed in a small kitchen in Skokie until her own body believes it. The men who sent her told her she was here to find her sister. They lied about most of the rest.
Andrei Vasilescu is the youngest pakhan of the Romanian familia in Chicago, the man who killed his own father at sixteen and has not, in the fifteen years since, allowed any woman who has crossed his threshold past the front hall of himself. He has been waiting, without naming what he is waiting for, for a woman who would walk up his drive and refuse to flinch.
What he does not yet know: she has not come for him. She has come for what he has in a green folder in a desk drawer.
What she does not yet know: he has been quietly carrying her sister’s file for nine months. He has been carrying a photograph of her mother for longer than that. And the contract he is about to offer her at his fire — one year, on his arm, never touched without asking — is the slowest and most dangerous trap she has ever walked into, because the only thing more frightening than a mafia hero who takes what he wants is one who refuses to.
A literary slow-burn dark mafia romance, set across Chicago and Bucharest, written for readers who want the heat and the operational menace of the genre with the emotional precision of a literary novel.
Andrei Vasilescu is the youngest pakhan of the Romanian familia in Chicago, the man who killed his own father at sixteen and has not, in the fifteen years since, allowed any woman who has crossed his threshold past the front hall of himself. He has been waiting, without naming what he is waiting for, for a woman who would walk up his drive and refuse to flinch.
What he does not yet know: she has not come for him. She has come for what he has in a green folder in a desk drawer.
What she does not yet know: he has been quietly carrying her sister’s file for nine months. He has been carrying a photograph of her mother for longer than that. And the contract he is about to offer her at his fire — one year, on his arm, never touched without asking — is the slowest and most dangerous trap she has ever walked into, because the only thing more frightening than a mafia hero who takes what he wants is one who refuses to.
A literary slow-burn dark mafia romance, set across Chicago and Bucharest, written for readers who want the heat and the operational menace of the genre with the emotional precision of a literary novel.
Used availability for Danielle Kent's The Debt