She put his best man away for nine years.
He decided that made her interesting.
Dani Callahan is a Cook County prosecutor who built the Kravets case from nothing, switched her witness list six weeks out, and won a trial everyone expected to fold. She is not intimidated by powerful men. She is, however, currently being driven to an unknown location by two of them — because a car just mounted the pavement toward her, and the only person who apparently saw it coming is Theo Zenko.
Theo Zenko runs the North Side.
He has run it for nine years with the precision of someone who finds chaos personally offensive and the authority of someone nobody challenges twice. He didn't mean to put Dani Callahan in his orbit. He meant to make sure she never beat him in a courtroom again. What he didn't account for was that she'd get into his SUV without flinching, negotiate her conditions from a wall she could have walked away from, and make a sound over his coffee that he is going to be thinking about for a very long time.
The marriage is strategic. That's what they both tell themselves.
It's the protection she needs when a Conti family operative decides she's a loose end. It's the political statement his captains have been waiting for. It's an arrangement with conditions, a dissolution clause, and absolutely no shared bedroom.
Until it isn't any of those things anymore.
Cold Hands is a full-length dark Bratva romance set in Chicago's criminal underworld — where the lake is always watching, the coffee is always good, and the man who keeps giving you his coat in November is not doing it for strategic reasons, whatever he tells himself.
This is enemies to lovers, forced marriage, and a slow burn that turns explicit. There is humour, there is danger, there are morally grey choices made by intelligent people who know exactly what they're doing. Nobody fades to black. Nobody is naive about the world they're in. And the woman who prosecuted him is, eventually, the only person he trusts with the full picture.
Features:
• Enemies to lovers with a slow, expensive burn
• Marriage of convenience that stops being convenient
• Age gap (he's 38, she's 27 ''' he has no idea what he's doing, she does)
• Forced proximity / protective custody arc
• Bratva pakhan hero who makes coffee and names cats and is genuinely frightening
• Prosecutor heroine who argues from walls and doesn't back down
• Explicit heat with no fade to black, ever
• Pregnancy in Act 3
• A cat called Justice who has strong opinions about everything
Cold Hands is Book One in the Zenko Bratva series. Each book follows a different couple. This one ends where it should. The next one is already on fire.
He decided that made her interesting.
Dani Callahan is a Cook County prosecutor who built the Kravets case from nothing, switched her witness list six weeks out, and won a trial everyone expected to fold. She is not intimidated by powerful men. She is, however, currently being driven to an unknown location by two of them — because a car just mounted the pavement toward her, and the only person who apparently saw it coming is Theo Zenko.
Theo Zenko runs the North Side.
He has run it for nine years with the precision of someone who finds chaos personally offensive and the authority of someone nobody challenges twice. He didn't mean to put Dani Callahan in his orbit. He meant to make sure she never beat him in a courtroom again. What he didn't account for was that she'd get into his SUV without flinching, negotiate her conditions from a wall she could have walked away from, and make a sound over his coffee that he is going to be thinking about for a very long time.
The marriage is strategic. That's what they both tell themselves.
It's the protection she needs when a Conti family operative decides she's a loose end. It's the political statement his captains have been waiting for. It's an arrangement with conditions, a dissolution clause, and absolutely no shared bedroom.
Until it isn't any of those things anymore.
Cold Hands is a full-length dark Bratva romance set in Chicago's criminal underworld — where the lake is always watching, the coffee is always good, and the man who keeps giving you his coat in November is not doing it for strategic reasons, whatever he tells himself.
This is enemies to lovers, forced marriage, and a slow burn that turns explicit. There is humour, there is danger, there are morally grey choices made by intelligent people who know exactly what they're doing. Nobody fades to black. Nobody is naive about the world they're in. And the woman who prosecuted him is, eventually, the only person he trusts with the full picture.
Features:
• Enemies to lovers with a slow, expensive burn
• Marriage of convenience that stops being convenient
• Age gap (he's 38, she's 27 ''' he has no idea what he's doing, she does)
• Forced proximity / protective custody arc
• Bratva pakhan hero who makes coffee and names cats and is genuinely frightening
• Prosecutor heroine who argues from walls and doesn't back down
• Explicit heat with no fade to black, ever
• Pregnancy in Act 3
• A cat called Justice who has strong opinions about everything
Cold Hands is Book One in the Zenko Bratva series. Each book follows a different couple. This one ends where it should. The next one is already on fire.
Used availability for Cora J Riley's Cold Mercy