He walked into her ER at two in the morning with a shot man and a card he expected her to take.
She took it. That was her first mistake.
Mara Voss is a South Side trauma nurse with a gift for staying calm in disasters and a deep, personal objection to Aleksei Zolotov on principle. He's the head of Chicago's most dangerous Bratva. He owns the police. He has people watching her hospital. He stood in her exam room and told her she wouldn't be reporting the gunshot wound, and he said it like a fact rather than a threat, and she hated that she understood the difference.
She should have thrown the card away.
She didn't.
Aleksei Zolotov hasn't needed anything outside his organisation for eight years. He built it that way deliberately — the life of a man who has stripped out everything that can be used against him. Then a South Side ER nurse sutured his man's shoulder without her hands shaking while he stood three feet away, and he went back to the hospital café on a Tuesday morning for reasons he is not prepared to examine.
He is used to wanting things and getting them. He is not used to things that won't be managed.
RUTHLESS is a full-length dark Bratva romance set in Chicago's criminal underworld, following Mara — foul-mouthed, competent, constitutionally unable to stop reaching for broken things — and Aleksei — controlled, morally grey, and catastrophically specific about the one woman he can't calculate out of his system. With a Koval Syndicate war escalating around them, a field medical arrangement that keeps blurring into something else, and a corner booth at a South Side diner that becomes the unexpected heart of everything, this is a slow-burn enemies-to-lovers story that earns every moment.
Content Warning: Dark romance. Explicit sexual content. Graphic violence. Dubcon elements. Morally grey antiheroes doing terrible things. Strong language throughout. HEA.
Part of The Broken Saints Series — four childhood friends, four Bratva men, and one corner booth that holds all of it.
She took it. That was her first mistake.
Mara Voss is a South Side trauma nurse with a gift for staying calm in disasters and a deep, personal objection to Aleksei Zolotov on principle. He's the head of Chicago's most dangerous Bratva. He owns the police. He has people watching her hospital. He stood in her exam room and told her she wouldn't be reporting the gunshot wound, and he said it like a fact rather than a threat, and she hated that she understood the difference.
She should have thrown the card away.
She didn't.
Aleksei Zolotov hasn't needed anything outside his organisation for eight years. He built it that way deliberately — the life of a man who has stripped out everything that can be used against him. Then a South Side ER nurse sutured his man's shoulder without her hands shaking while he stood three feet away, and he went back to the hospital café on a Tuesday morning for reasons he is not prepared to examine.
He is used to wanting things and getting them. He is not used to things that won't be managed.
RUTHLESS is a full-length dark Bratva romance set in Chicago's criminal underworld, following Mara — foul-mouthed, competent, constitutionally unable to stop reaching for broken things — and Aleksei — controlled, morally grey, and catastrophically specific about the one woman he can't calculate out of his system. With a Koval Syndicate war escalating around them, a field medical arrangement that keeps blurring into something else, and a corner booth at a South Side diner that becomes the unexpected heart of everything, this is a slow-burn enemies-to-lovers story that earns every moment.
Content Warning: Dark romance. Explicit sexual content. Graphic violence. Dubcon elements. Morally grey antiheroes doing terrible things. Strong language throughout. HEA.
Part of The Broken Saints Series — four childhood friends, four Bratva men, and one corner booth that holds all of it.
Used availability for Cora J Riley's Ruthless