VENOM & VOWS

Some vows are carved into you by blood. Some you make because you want to. Only one of them is worth keeping.**

Arlo Reyes arrived at Tulane University with a plan: finish his pre-law degree, pass the bar, become a public defender, and never look back at the world that swallowed his father whole. He knows what men like Matteo Vitale are. He grew up in the shadow of what they cost. He knows better than to look twice.

He looks twice.

Matteo Vitale is the heir to the most insulated crime family in New Orleans, enrolled at Tulane to launder legitimacy onto a name that has never needed it. He is controlled, precise, and fluent in three languages, one of which is violence. He has spent six years building a sealed room around the part of himself he cannot afford to show, and two years quietly building the evidence that might finally set him free. What he has not planned for is a scholarship student from Central City who sees through every layer of his construction in the first sixty seconds and is not afraid of what is underneath.

What begins as a forced research partnership becomes something neither man has the vocabulary for: a collision between two people who have spent their entire lives deciding that love is the thing you cannot afford, learning, at significant cost, that they were wrong.

Set against the lush, layered streets of New Orleans, from the Garden District's iron-fenced silence to the warm, jazz-soaked nights of the Marigny, *Venom & Vows* is a slow-burn dark MM romance about inherited wounds, chosen vows, and the specific courage it takes to be known by someone who knows exactly what they are choosing.

Some things are worth the poison to get to.

Pick up Venom & Vows today and find out if they make it out together.