Torment's Tribulation

She repossessed the wrong truck. A patient killer decided she was worth the wait.

Selena Vance answers to no one. Foster care taught her the only person who saves you is yourself. Two tours as an Army MP taught her the rest. Now she works repo in Newark—solitary, on her terms, owing nobody. Then she tows a truck carrying two million in stolen electronics, and the Carretti family carves a message into her door: return what's ours.

She should have run somewhere they couldn't follow. She should have handled it alone, the way she handles everything.

She's never met anyone like Torment.

He made men break slowly. She made him want to build something that lasts.

Victor "Torment" Santos is the exception to Creeping Death's one rule. Where his brothers move fast, he takes his time—an Army interrogator who learned that when information matters more than bodies, patience is the weapon. When the quiet woman from his VA group shows up bruised and cornered by a crime family, something shifts. She's marked for death. That makes her his.

But Selena Vance doesn't want a rescuer. She wants to stand beside him—and Torment discovers that the woman who's spent her whole life refusing help is the one thing he'll take his time to earn.

As the Carretti operation crumbles under Creeping Death's assault, Torment realizes protecting Selena isn't enough. He wants to claim her—in front of his brothers, in front of a seventy-year criminal empire that thought patience only ran one direction. And Selena's learning that stillness isn't surrender, and the man who taught her to accept help is the one she never wants to save herself from again.

In Newark's industrial heart, where refinery flames light the sky and old family money buries its problems, one woman will discover that answering to herself was never the same as being alone—and one patient, dangerous man will finally let the stillness be shared.