KEPT BY THE DON

My brother's debt was never going to be paid in money. It paid off for me.
I'm June Hale — twenty-six, a sous-chef with flour under her nails and a brother who thought he could out-bluff the most dangerous man in the city. Danny lost. And when the Don comes to collect, he doesn't take cash.
He takes me.
One year. That's the arrangement. I live in his house, I answer to him, I don't leave without an escort, and in exchange my brother keeps his kneecaps and his life. Roman Kadric — the Don, the man the whole city answers to — calls it a contract. I call it a cage with very good lighting.
He is everything I was raised to run from — cold, precise, terrifyingly controlling, a man who rebuilt an empire out of his own father's blood and has never once apologized for what that cost him. He watches me like he's cataloguing weaknesses. He touches me like he already owns the outcome. And God help me, I stop wanting to run.
The Don doesn't believe in wanting things he can lose. He buried that lesson with his mother when he was twelve years old, and he's spent twenty-three years making sure nothing gets close enough to be taken from him again. June Hale was supposed to be a debt on a ledger. She was never supposed to become the first thing he's afraid of losing.
But a throne like his comes with enemies, and enemies have started circling the one soft place he's ever let them see. Before this year is over, Roman will have to choose between the empire that made him untouchable and the woman he was never supposed to want to keep.
Kept by the Don is a full-length, standalone dark romance with a guaranteed HEA — no cheating, no cliffhanger, explicit heat throughout.
Tropes: Forced Proximity • Mafia Romance • Possessive Alpha • Dark/Damaged Hero • Debt-Bond Arrangement • Forbidden Want
18+ only. Contains explicit sexual content, power-imbalance dynamics, and depictions of organized-crime violence. All characters are consenting adults.