She was never supposed to be mine.
She's the attorney's daughter.
She's practically family.
Everyone in the compound calls her little sister.
And she is categorically the last woman Nik Dushku is allowed to touch.
Which is exactly why he can't stop.
NIK
I don't notice Sara Marku. I haven't noticed her in three years — not since she walked into a summer barbecue in a yellow sundress and I jumped in a pool with my clothes on to get my heart rate back under a hundred. When my father orders me to bring her to the compound for her protection, I tell myself it's the job. I tell myself I can keep my hands to myself and my head out of the poetry notebook I keep buried in my gym locker. Thirteen Berisha attacks on civilian Albanian businesses. One nurse who refuses to stop running into danger. And me — the family enforcer, the weapon with a brain his father called a hazard — assigned to keep her alive in a house full of men who will unmake me if I touch her.
SARA
I don't do helpless. I run a free clinic in Pelham Bay. I work night shifts in the Bronx ER. I have patients whose glucose logs live on my phone and a father whose cardiomyopathy lives in my throat, and I am not — not — the kind of woman who lets a six-foot wall of ink and bad decisions physically carry her to an SUV. Nik Dushku has been watching me since I was twenty years old. I've been pretending not to notice. But the Bronxville compound is a gilded cage, the Berishas are burning down Arthur Avenue, and the enforcer assigned to guard me writes terrible, devastating poetry in a notebook he thinks nobody's found. I can keep escaping. Or I can stop running and see what he actually is underneath all that weaponized silence.
The third standalone in the Blood & Besa series — an Albanian mafia romance where the family enforcer falls for the one woman the Kanun says he can never have, and the woman who's spent her whole life saving others finally learns how to let someone save her back.
Blood & Besa is a series of interconnected standalones — each book follows a different Dushku brother, each delivers a full HEA, and each can be read in any order. The Darkest Refuge can absolutely be read first, though returning readers will catch the Berisha war escalating and several beloved side characters getting their moments.
Zemra ime. My heart. Which is to say: you.
Genre: Romantic Suspense
She's the attorney's daughter.
She's practically family.
Everyone in the compound calls her little sister.
And she is categorically the last woman Nik Dushku is allowed to touch.
Which is exactly why he can't stop.
NIK
I don't notice Sara Marku. I haven't noticed her in three years — not since she walked into a summer barbecue in a yellow sundress and I jumped in a pool with my clothes on to get my heart rate back under a hundred. When my father orders me to bring her to the compound for her protection, I tell myself it's the job. I tell myself I can keep my hands to myself and my head out of the poetry notebook I keep buried in my gym locker. Thirteen Berisha attacks on civilian Albanian businesses. One nurse who refuses to stop running into danger. And me — the family enforcer, the weapon with a brain his father called a hazard — assigned to keep her alive in a house full of men who will unmake me if I touch her.
SARA
I don't do helpless. I run a free clinic in Pelham Bay. I work night shifts in the Bronx ER. I have patients whose glucose logs live on my phone and a father whose cardiomyopathy lives in my throat, and I am not — not — the kind of woman who lets a six-foot wall of ink and bad decisions physically carry her to an SUV. Nik Dushku has been watching me since I was twenty years old. I've been pretending not to notice. But the Bronxville compound is a gilded cage, the Berishas are burning down Arthur Avenue, and the enforcer assigned to guard me writes terrible, devastating poetry in a notebook he thinks nobody's found. I can keep escaping. Or I can stop running and see what he actually is underneath all that weaponized silence.
The third standalone in the Blood & Besa series — an Albanian mafia romance where the family enforcer falls for the one woman the Kanun says he can never have, and the woman who's spent her whole life saving others finally learns how to let someone save her back.
Blood & Besa is a series of interconnected standalones — each book follows a different Dushku brother, each delivers a full HEA, and each can be read in any order. The Darkest Refuge can absolutely be read first, though returning readers will catch the Berisha war escalating and several beloved side characters getting their moments.
Zemra ime. My heart. Which is to say: you.
Genre: Romantic Suspense
Used availability for Sienna Marchetti's The Darkest Refuge