She left him in a Tirana hotel room five years ago. He never stopped setting a place for her at the table.
She found his family’s ring in his coat pocket.
She ran before he woke.
She left the coffee cup on the nightstand and the scent of fig on his pillow.
He canceled a flight. She never knew.
Luan Marku runs the financial side of the most powerful Albanian family in New York. He moves money across borders the way other men move chess pieces — precisely, patiently, three steps ahead. He cooks elaborate meals for one person. He reads romance novels on his Kindle when no one is looking. He has not been whole since a woman who smelled of Philosykos walked out of his life without saying goodbye.
Vera Sotiriu owns a Tribeca gallery that specializes in contemporary Balkan art. She authenticates paintings, curates beauty, and launders money for a Greek crime syndicate under duress. She has been surviving on composure and dry wit for five years — ever since she discovered the man she fell for in Tirana was Albanian mafia, and ran before the truth could catch her.
When the Karras syndicate threatens to destroy Vera’s gallery — and her life — the Dushku family offers protection. The price: a fake relationship with the family’s financial ghost. The man who already knows what her perfume smells like in the morning. The man she left.
LUAN
The cover story is simple: she’s mine. We are together. The Greeks will not touch what belongs to a Dushku. All I have to do is pretend to love a woman I never stopped loving, cook for her without letting my hands remember how they used to touch her, and authenticate a series of paintings using a game we invented in a Tirana hotel room when we were both younger and stupider and still capable of believing this wouldn’t ruin us.
Seven paintings. Each one authenticated with one truth and one question. Every truth peels back a layer. Every question brings us closer to the thing we buried. By painting four, I am no longer pretending. By painting six, I am no longer capable of pretending.
VERA
I left him because his ring was in his coat pocket and his family name was on a list my father circled in red ink twenty years ago. I have been running from a dead man’s circle ever since. Now the running is over, the fake relationship is not fake, and every painting he authenticates tells me a truth I was not prepared to hear: my father drew the circle because he loved Luan'''s father, not because he hated him. I have been hating a Dushku for five years because I could not hold two dead men in the same breath.
The fourth standalone in the Blood & Besa series — an Albanian mafia romance where the financial ghost falls for the gallery owner he lost five years ago, the fake relationship was never fake, and every meal he cooks is a love letter he cannot yet say out loud.
Genre: Romantic Suspense
She found his family’s ring in his coat pocket.
She ran before he woke.
She left the coffee cup on the nightstand and the scent of fig on his pillow.
He canceled a flight. She never knew.
Luan Marku runs the financial side of the most powerful Albanian family in New York. He moves money across borders the way other men move chess pieces — precisely, patiently, three steps ahead. He cooks elaborate meals for one person. He reads romance novels on his Kindle when no one is looking. He has not been whole since a woman who smelled of Philosykos walked out of his life without saying goodbye.
Vera Sotiriu owns a Tribeca gallery that specializes in contemporary Balkan art. She authenticates paintings, curates beauty, and launders money for a Greek crime syndicate under duress. She has been surviving on composure and dry wit for five years — ever since she discovered the man she fell for in Tirana was Albanian mafia, and ran before the truth could catch her.
When the Karras syndicate threatens to destroy Vera’s gallery — and her life — the Dushku family offers protection. The price: a fake relationship with the family’s financial ghost. The man who already knows what her perfume smells like in the morning. The man she left.
LUAN
The cover story is simple: she’s mine. We are together. The Greeks will not touch what belongs to a Dushku. All I have to do is pretend to love a woman I never stopped loving, cook for her without letting my hands remember how they used to touch her, and authenticate a series of paintings using a game we invented in a Tirana hotel room when we were both younger and stupider and still capable of believing this wouldn’t ruin us.
Seven paintings. Each one authenticated with one truth and one question. Every truth peels back a layer. Every question brings us closer to the thing we buried. By painting four, I am no longer pretending. By painting six, I am no longer capable of pretending.
VERA
I left him because his ring was in his coat pocket and his family name was on a list my father circled in red ink twenty years ago. I have been running from a dead man’s circle ever since. Now the running is over, the fake relationship is not fake, and every painting he authenticates tells me a truth I was not prepared to hear: my father drew the circle because he loved Luan'''s father, not because he hated him. I have been hating a Dushku for five years because I could not hold two dead men in the same breath.
The fourth standalone in the Blood & Besa series — an Albanian mafia romance where the financial ghost falls for the gallery owner he lost five years ago, the fake relationship was never fake, and every meal he cooks is a love letter he cannot yet say out loud.
Genre: Romantic Suspense
Used availability for Sienna Marchetti's The Cruelest Truth