The grin was real. Everything else was a lie.
Dima Volynets is the man who holds the Volkov compound together. The talker. The fixer. The guy who walks into a room and the room rearranges around him. He’s warm and loud and funny and everyone loves him. Everyone.
Nobody knows he’s lonely.
Noor Hadid is a baker. She runs a little shop in Park Slope called Crumb, wakes up at 3:30am to make sourdough, and has a cat named Zaatar who judges everyone. She’s warm and direct and she sees things — the way people hold their coffee cups, the way couples argue without arguing, the way a man who never stops grinning is performing for the room instead of living in it.
When Dima walks into her bakery on a Tuesday morning and delivers a forty-five-second monologue about a hostile cat and his willingness to be altered by a croissant, she doesn’t smile. He clocks this. He makes it his mission.
Forty-five seconds. That’s his time.
He becomes the regular. The 7:05am guy. The almond croissant, the corner table, the man who tips five on a seven-fifty order and learns everyone’s name and brings pastries back to a compound he won’t describe, for a family he won’t explain, doing work he calls ‘security.’
Noor notices. Noor always notices. She notices the room-scanning. The not-turning-his-back. The way he deflects every personal question with a joke so smooth she almost doesn’t catch the deflection.
Almost.
Because Dima Volynets is Bratva. Russian mafia. And the bakery, the croissants, the grin, the ‘I’m in security’ — it’s all a lie. Not the feelings. Not the way he looks at her like she’s the first real thing he’s touched in years. But everything around the feelings. Every single thing.
And when the lie breaks — when she follows him to a compound with armed guards and a gate and a world she never knew existed — the woman who sees everything has to decide if what she sees underneath the lie is worth what the lie cost.
His Darkest Lie is a dark Bratva romance novella featuring the compound’s golden boy who’s been faking it for twelve years, a baker who sees through everyone including him, a Ukrainian cook who considers croissant lamination a character reference, a cat who is diagnostic, and the question of whether a man who learned to smile so people wouldn’t leave can learn to stop smiling so one person will stay. HEA guaranteed. The counter has been sanitised.
Genre: Romance
Dima Volynets is the man who holds the Volkov compound together. The talker. The fixer. The guy who walks into a room and the room rearranges around him. He’s warm and loud and funny and everyone loves him. Everyone.
Nobody knows he’s lonely.
Noor Hadid is a baker. She runs a little shop in Park Slope called Crumb, wakes up at 3:30am to make sourdough, and has a cat named Zaatar who judges everyone. She’s warm and direct and she sees things — the way people hold their coffee cups, the way couples argue without arguing, the way a man who never stops grinning is performing for the room instead of living in it.
When Dima walks into her bakery on a Tuesday morning and delivers a forty-five-second monologue about a hostile cat and his willingness to be altered by a croissant, she doesn’t smile. He clocks this. He makes it his mission.
Forty-five seconds. That’s his time.
He becomes the regular. The 7:05am guy. The almond croissant, the corner table, the man who tips five on a seven-fifty order and learns everyone’s name and brings pastries back to a compound he won’t describe, for a family he won’t explain, doing work he calls ‘security.’
Noor notices. Noor always notices. She notices the room-scanning. The not-turning-his-back. The way he deflects every personal question with a joke so smooth she almost doesn’t catch the deflection.
Almost.
Because Dima Volynets is Bratva. Russian mafia. And the bakery, the croissants, the grin, the ‘I’m in security’ — it’s all a lie. Not the feelings. Not the way he looks at her like she’s the first real thing he’s touched in years. But everything around the feelings. Every single thing.
And when the lie breaks — when she follows him to a compound with armed guards and a gate and a world she never knew existed — the woman who sees everything has to decide if what she sees underneath the lie is worth what the lie cost.
His Darkest Lie is a dark Bratva romance novella featuring the compound’s golden boy who’s been faking it for twelve years, a baker who sees through everyone including him, a Ukrainian cook who considers croissant lamination a character reference, a cat who is diagnostic, and the question of whether a man who learned to smile so people wouldn’t leave can learn to stop smiling so one person will stay. HEA guaranteed. The counter has been sanitised.
Genre: Romance
Used availability for Cora J Riley's His Darkest Lie