*He's been called many things. She calls him a wall with a suit on. She has a list.*
Petra Vashchenko didn't agree to be here.
Her father offered her as collateral — without asking, without telling her, without apparently considering that she might have opinions about being used as a guarantee of good faith in someone else's deal. She found out when Damien Volkov arrived to inform her of the terms. She had a lot to say about it. She organised her thoughts into six sections. With subsections. And examples.
He sat through all of it.
Damien Volkov has been the most dangerous man in any room for twenty-three years. He is still. He is precise. He uses forty percent of the words most people would use to say the same thing, and every one of them is selected. He has never once in two decades of this work met a problem he couldn't manage into silence.
He cannot make her silent.
He has, at this point, stopped trying.
What he has not stopped doing: making the coffee exactly right every morning before she's awake. Getting her water when she says she needs it. Sitting completely still while she says everything she needs to say. Waiting — with the patience of a man who learned stillness from bees — for the moment to be right.
The moment, it turns out, was always going to arrive.
The question is what they do when it does.
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**Brutal Saint** is the second book in The Morozov Brotherhood — a dark Bratva romance series set in New York City. It features dual POV, explicit heat, enemies-to-lovers with genuine enemies-energy, and a hero who is six-foot-two of controlled stillness and a heroine who has a colour-coded notebook and is not afraid of either.
Standalone HEA. Can be read without Book 1, but best enjoyed in order.
**Content warning:** Explicit sexual content, organised crime, morally complex characters, references to difficult family dynamics. Intended for readers 18+.
Petra Vashchenko didn't agree to be here.
Her father offered her as collateral — without asking, without telling her, without apparently considering that she might have opinions about being used as a guarantee of good faith in someone else's deal. She found out when Damien Volkov arrived to inform her of the terms. She had a lot to say about it. She organised her thoughts into six sections. With subsections. And examples.
He sat through all of it.
Damien Volkov has been the most dangerous man in any room for twenty-three years. He is still. He is precise. He uses forty percent of the words most people would use to say the same thing, and every one of them is selected. He has never once in two decades of this work met a problem he couldn't manage into silence.
He cannot make her silent.
He has, at this point, stopped trying.
What he has not stopped doing: making the coffee exactly right every morning before she's awake. Getting her water when she says she needs it. Sitting completely still while she says everything she needs to say. Waiting — with the patience of a man who learned stillness from bees — for the moment to be right.
The moment, it turns out, was always going to arrive.
The question is what they do when it does.
---
**Brutal Saint** is the second book in The Morozov Brotherhood — a dark Bratva romance series set in New York City. It features dual POV, explicit heat, enemies-to-lovers with genuine enemies-energy, and a hero who is six-foot-two of controlled stillness and a heroine who has a colour-coded notebook and is not afraid of either.
Standalone HEA. Can be read without Book 1, but best enjoyed in order.
**Content warning:** Explicit sexual content, organised crime, morally complex characters, references to difficult family dynamics. Intended for readers 18+.
Used availability for Cora J Riley's Brutal Saint