He catches things for a living. I've never once been caught.
I've had eleven names and no home since I was six. My grandmother taught me to disappear before she taught me to read — because the truth I carry, the truth of what really happened to a Bratva queen twenty-six years ago, is worth killing for, and the men who want it buried have hunted my family for three generations.
So I did the one thing a runner never does. I stopped running away. I ran toward the most dangerous family in Chicago — the dead queen’s sons — because they’re the only people alive who’d kill to protect what I carry instead of to erase it.
They sent Maksim Morozov to find me. The hand of the family. The one they send after people who don’t want to be found. He hunted me for two days and I let him catch me, and then he did the thing no hunter has ever done.
He didn’t want to trap me. He wanted me to stop needing to run.
He gave me a word that stops his whole world. He put the end of a leash in my hand and swore he’d never let go. For the first time in my life, I stopped watching the door.
And then, in a room full of kings, with my family’s oldest enemy watching, the man who swore he’d never let go opened his hand and told the world I was nothing.
I read faces for a living. I read absence — the shape of what’s been removed. So I know exactly what it looks like when a man cuts you out of his life.
I just have to decide, before it’s too late for both of us, whether the cut was a betrayal — or the only love letter a man in an impossible place could write.
❧
THE LEASH is Book Two of Sanctum: The Morozov Bratva — a dark, primal, predator-and-prey BDSM Bratva romance with a feral dominant hero who falls first, a heroine who’s never once been caught, a buried-mother mystery braided through the heat, and a guaranteed happily-ever-after. Full standalone. The safeword is real.
I've had eleven names and no home since I was six. My grandmother taught me to disappear before she taught me to read — because the truth I carry, the truth of what really happened to a Bratva queen twenty-six years ago, is worth killing for, and the men who want it buried have hunted my family for three generations.
So I did the one thing a runner never does. I stopped running away. I ran toward the most dangerous family in Chicago — the dead queen’s sons — because they’re the only people alive who’d kill to protect what I carry instead of to erase it.
They sent Maksim Morozov to find me. The hand of the family. The one they send after people who don’t want to be found. He hunted me for two days and I let him catch me, and then he did the thing no hunter has ever done.
He didn’t want to trap me. He wanted me to stop needing to run.
He gave me a word that stops his whole world. He put the end of a leash in my hand and swore he’d never let go. For the first time in my life, I stopped watching the door.
And then, in a room full of kings, with my family’s oldest enemy watching, the man who swore he’d never let go opened his hand and told the world I was nothing.
I read faces for a living. I read absence — the shape of what’s been removed. So I know exactly what it looks like when a man cuts you out of his life.
I just have to decide, before it’s too late for both of us, whether the cut was a betrayal — or the only love letter a man in an impossible place could write.
❧
THE LEASH is Book Two of Sanctum: The Morozov Bratva — a dark, primal, predator-and-prey BDSM Bratva romance with a feral dominant hero who falls first, a heroine who’s never once been caught, a buried-mother mystery braided through the heat, and a guaranteed happily-ever-after. Full standalone. The safeword is real.
Used availability for Danielle Kent's The Leash