THE DEVIL’S CROWN

A marriage is not an assignment.
Elena Rossi restores buildings. She knows what a wall was before it was painted over, which seal is a forgery, and which century a lie was added in. None of it saves her from the altar, because the Vitale family is holding her father and the price of his life is her signature.
What Marco Vitale does not know is that the Rossi trust cannot be taken by a husband. It needs two independent trustees. One is dead. The other is the man tied to a chair in a photograph Marco sends her every time she refuses.
So the marriage was never the point. It was the leverage.
Dante Vitale is her husband’s half-brother, the family’s consigliere, and the only person offering her a door she can open from either side — which would be easier to accept if he had not helped bury the paperwork that put her here.
Elena fights the way she was trained to: pigment, paper stock, ink age, a map hidden under a chapel painting, and a service tunnel beneath the old seawall that the plans say was sealed seven years ago and that still takes delivery of fresh ventilation filters every month.
She will not be rescued, and she will not sign. She will file.
The Devil’s Crown concludes Blood Oaths, the two-book mafia dark romance begun in Silent Vengeance. For adult readers: coercion, criminal violence, and an unhurried love story in which every yes is spoken out loud and may be taken back.