My father sold me to a monster.
The other monster took me first.
My father signed me away to the Volkov family when I was sixteen. By twenty-two, I had a wedding date, a six-year engagement, and the kind of training that turned Italian-American girls into someone else's wife.
Then Dante Sarantos kidnapped me from my own dress fitting.
He was supposed to be my fiancé's enemy. He was supposed to use me as leverage. He was supposed to be the cold, brutal heir of the Sarantos Bratva — and for the first three days, in his house, behind a locked door, that was exactly the man he was.
Then he found out what my fiancé had really been moving through his harbour.
Then everything changed.
He doesn't ask. He doesn't beg. He doesn't promise.
He just stops being the man who took me.
And in his kitchen, in his shirt, in the small clean lamplight of a room he won't let me into — slowly, on my own decision — I become the woman my mother told me, in a letter she wrote when I was four years old, I would, in some city of some year of my own life, finally be.
My own.
THE PAKHAN'S CAPTIVE is the first book in The Sarantos Bratva, a slow-burn dark mafia romance series set in present-day Boston. Featuring a virgin heroine who finds her voice, a morally grey hero who loses his composure, an Italian-American family of women a hundred and forty-four years deep, and the kind of Russian-Greek Pakhan kitchen politics that will ruin you for less.
Standalone HEA. Slow burn. 129,000 words.
Reader notice:
Dark themes including kidnapping, off-page violence, references to human trafficking (no on-page depictions), and explicit sexual content. Adult readers only. Full content notes available on the author's website.
Genre: Mystery
The other monster took me first.
My father signed me away to the Volkov family when I was sixteen. By twenty-two, I had a wedding date, a six-year engagement, and the kind of training that turned Italian-American girls into someone else's wife.
Then Dante Sarantos kidnapped me from my own dress fitting.
He was supposed to be my fiancé's enemy. He was supposed to use me as leverage. He was supposed to be the cold, brutal heir of the Sarantos Bratva — and for the first three days, in his house, behind a locked door, that was exactly the man he was.
Then he found out what my fiancé had really been moving through his harbour.
Then everything changed.
He doesn't ask. He doesn't beg. He doesn't promise.
He just stops being the man who took me.
And in his kitchen, in his shirt, in the small clean lamplight of a room he won't let me into — slowly, on my own decision — I become the woman my mother told me, in a letter she wrote when I was four years old, I would, in some city of some year of my own life, finally be.
My own.
THE PAKHAN'S CAPTIVE is the first book in The Sarantos Bratva, a slow-burn dark mafia romance series set in present-day Boston. Featuring a virgin heroine who finds her voice, a morally grey hero who loses his composure, an Italian-American family of women a hundred and forty-four years deep, and the kind of Russian-Greek Pakhan kitchen politics that will ruin you for less.
Standalone HEA. Slow burn. 129,000 words.
Reader notice:
Dark themes including kidnapping, off-page violence, references to human trafficking (no on-page depictions), and explicit sexual content. Adult readers only. Full content notes available on the author's website.
Genre: Mystery
Used availability for Cora J Riley's Captive of the Pakhan