He didn't buy me.
He accepted me as payment.
There's a difference, Aleksander Morozov told me, when I arrived at his Chicago building with nothing but my uncle's debt and three languages I didn't ask to inherit.
I'm still working out what it is.
My father was Dmitri Volkov — Bratva intelligence, dead two years, and apparently worth considerably less than what my uncle owed. I'm the settlement. Delivered to the most controlled man in the city, who wants what my father left inside my head: eleven years of routes, contacts, politicians, and secrets, stored in a memory palace I built before I understood what it was for.
Morozov thinks he can extract it.
He can't. The intelligence isn't a file. It's me. And I'm not a woman who gives things away — not without knowing exactly what I'm getting in return.
He's cold, surgical, and patient in a way that should be impossible. He builds things and they stay built. He hasn't raised his voice once since I arrived, which I find more alarming than shouting.
He also took the door off my room at midnight and called it the wrong architecture.
I told him he was insufferable.
He said: okay.
I'm beginning to understand that word means something different here.
The arrangement was supposed to be simple. An exchange. His protection for my father's intelligence. A transaction between two people who don't trust each other and have no reason to start.
But Aleksander Morozov is not a simple man. And I am not a simple woman. And somewhere between the east room sessions and the Rotterdam discrepancy and the dinner where he put his bracelet on my wrist in front of Moscow men who needed to understand something —
The arrangement became something else entirely.
Claimed is a dark Bratva romance featuring a feisty heroine who refuses to be managed, a cold and patient hero who has never met anyone he couldn't outmanoeuvre, and a slow-burn enemies-to-lovers tension that builds until something finally gives. Part of The Morozov Series. HEA guaranteed.
Content warnings: dark themes, power imbalance, morally grey hero, violence, mature content 18+
He accepted me as payment.
There's a difference, Aleksander Morozov told me, when I arrived at his Chicago building with nothing but my uncle's debt and three languages I didn't ask to inherit.
I'm still working out what it is.
My father was Dmitri Volkov — Bratva intelligence, dead two years, and apparently worth considerably less than what my uncle owed. I'm the settlement. Delivered to the most controlled man in the city, who wants what my father left inside my head: eleven years of routes, contacts, politicians, and secrets, stored in a memory palace I built before I understood what it was for.
Morozov thinks he can extract it.
He can't. The intelligence isn't a file. It's me. And I'm not a woman who gives things away — not without knowing exactly what I'm getting in return.
He's cold, surgical, and patient in a way that should be impossible. He builds things and they stay built. He hasn't raised his voice once since I arrived, which I find more alarming than shouting.
He also took the door off my room at midnight and called it the wrong architecture.
I told him he was insufferable.
He said: okay.
I'm beginning to understand that word means something different here.
The arrangement was supposed to be simple. An exchange. His protection for my father's intelligence. A transaction between two people who don't trust each other and have no reason to start.
But Aleksander Morozov is not a simple man. And I am not a simple woman. And somewhere between the east room sessions and the Rotterdam discrepancy and the dinner where he put his bracelet on my wrist in front of Moscow men who needed to understand something —
The arrangement became something else entirely.
Claimed is a dark Bratva romance featuring a feisty heroine who refuses to be managed, a cold and patient hero who has never met anyone he couldn't outmanoeuvre, and a slow-burn enemies-to-lovers tension that builds until something finally gives. Part of The Morozov Series. HEA guaranteed.
Content warnings: dark themes, power imbalance, morally grey hero, violence, mature content 18+
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Used availability for Cora J Riley's Claimed