I was barely attending my postgrad course, killing time in an Alfama restaurant, when a man two booths over was shot dead in front of me. Wrong booth. Wrong night.
Aleksei ordered that hit. He didn't order a witness.
Every rule of his trade said neutralise the threat. Instead the Russian fixer who's quietly run Iberia for fifteen years drove me out to a Sintra estate "for my protection" and never quite explained why he doesn't just make me disappear.
I call his bluff. *If you were going to hurt me, you'd have done it.*
He doesn't answer. The silence is the loudest thing I've ever heard.
He learns to say *rapaz* in his blunt, functional Portuguese, and uses it to close a distance neither of us admits is closing. Long windows. Sintra mist. Both of us pretending until we stop.
I know what he is.
I'm staying anyway.
A dark, explicit MM mafia standalone. Age gap, captive romance, guaranteed HEA.
Tropes & kinks: age gap · witness & captor · forced proximity · protector · slow burn · morally grey · can't-let-him-go · possessive alpha · hideaway · guaranteed HEA
Genre: Gay Romance
Aleksei ordered that hit. He didn't order a witness.
Every rule of his trade said neutralise the threat. Instead the Russian fixer who's quietly run Iberia for fifteen years drove me out to a Sintra estate "for my protection" and never quite explained why he doesn't just make me disappear.
I call his bluff. *If you were going to hurt me, you'd have done it.*
He doesn't answer. The silence is the loudest thing I've ever heard.
He learns to say *rapaz* in his blunt, functional Portuguese, and uses it to close a distance neither of us admits is closing. Long windows. Sintra mist. Both of us pretending until we stop.
I know what he is.
I'm staying anyway.
A dark, explicit MM mafia standalone. Age gap, captive romance, guaranteed HEA.
Tropes & kinks: age gap · witness & captor · forced proximity · protector · slow burn · morally grey · can't-let-him-go · possessive alpha · hideaway · guaranteed HEA
Genre: Gay Romance
Used availability for Jude Steel's The Lisbon Brat