He took me off the street on a Tuesday.
I was standing outside a restaurant checking my phone, deciding between the salmon and the duck, when the black SUV pulled to the kerb. One quiet instruction. One locked door. And just like that, I became leverage.
Alexei Volkov is the Volkov Bratva's pakhan — cold, controlled, and terrifying in the way that men are terrifying when they never need to raise their voice. He took me to settle a debt with my father. He gave me a gilded cage in a Brooklyn Heights townhouse and told me my father would come for me.
My father didn't come.
What I didn't expect was the library with north-facing light. The pasta he cooked on Sundays. The way he said my name like he'd been saying it for years. The scar on his chest he showed me one night over whisky, and the thing that happened in the space between us that neither of us had a word for.
He was supposed to be the villain of this story.
He was. He just wasn't only that.
Now his fiancée is gone, my boyfriend is a distant memory, and I'm standing in a farmer's market on a Saturday morning with Alexei Volkov in front of me saying my name like a question he already knows the answer to.
I should go home.
I should go back to my apartment in Carroll Gardens and my ordinary life and the woman I was before a black car changed everything on a Tuesday in October.
But he said: if you still want this.
And I do.
Taken by the Pakhan is the first book in the Blood Covenant Series — a dark Bratva romance featuring captivity, slow burn, explicit content, and a morally grey hero who is exactly as dangerous as advertised.
For readers 18+ only. HEA guaranteed.
Genre: Mystery
I was standing outside a restaurant checking my phone, deciding between the salmon and the duck, when the black SUV pulled to the kerb. One quiet instruction. One locked door. And just like that, I became leverage.
Alexei Volkov is the Volkov Bratva's pakhan — cold, controlled, and terrifying in the way that men are terrifying when they never need to raise their voice. He took me to settle a debt with my father. He gave me a gilded cage in a Brooklyn Heights townhouse and told me my father would come for me.
My father didn't come.
What I didn't expect was the library with north-facing light. The pasta he cooked on Sundays. The way he said my name like he'd been saying it for years. The scar on his chest he showed me one night over whisky, and the thing that happened in the space between us that neither of us had a word for.
He was supposed to be the villain of this story.
He was. He just wasn't only that.
Now his fiancée is gone, my boyfriend is a distant memory, and I'm standing in a farmer's market on a Saturday morning with Alexei Volkov in front of me saying my name like a question he already knows the answer to.
I should go home.
I should go back to my apartment in Carroll Gardens and my ordinary life and the woman I was before a black car changed everything on a Tuesday in October.
But he said: if you still want this.
And I do.
Taken by the Pakhan is the first book in the Blood Covenant Series — a dark Bratva romance featuring captivity, slow burn, explicit content, and a morally grey hero who is exactly as dangerous as advertised.
For readers 18+ only. HEA guaranteed.
Genre: Mystery
Used availability for Cora J Riley's Taken by the Pakhan