Ruthless Collateral

Vera

I was never meant to inherit anything from my father except his debts.

When the man who runs half the underworld on the Eastern Seaboard calls in what my father owes him, I expect a bullet. Instead, I get a marriage contract with my name already signed at the bottom — collateral against a truce between two families who hate each other more than they love peace.

Dominic Rossi doesn't want a wife. He wants a hostage with a ring on her finger, someone to keep in his compound where he can watch her, use her, break the last of what's left of her family's name. I'm supposed to hate him. I do hate him — for exactly as long as it takes him to put himself between me and the men who come to finish what my father started.

He's not protecting a wife. He's protecting something he won't name. And I'm starting to think the monster everyone warned me about isn't the one standing in my bedroom doorway every night, daring me to run.

Dominic

She was supposed to be a debt paid in flesh. A message to every family still testing my patience. Instead she's the first thing in fifteen years I've wanted to keep instead of spend.

That makes her a liability. It makes her a target. And when the men who murdered her father come looking for the one piece of leverage I have left, it makes her the only thing I've ever been afraid to lose.

I built an empire out of never needing anyone. She's about to cost me all of it.

Two families. One truce built on a lie. And a war neither of us can survive unless we survive it together.

RUTHLESS COLLATERAL is a full-length, standalone Dark Mafia Romantic Suspense with a guaranteed HEA and the threat fully resolved by the final page.

Tropes: Forced Marriage • Mafia / Organized Crime • Morally Grey Anti-Hero • Forced Proximity • Slow Burn to Explicit Heat • Secrets & Hidden Past