He swore not to touch her. She didn't expect to start asking.
Dark mafia romance - Free with Kindle Unlimited at launch - Mature readers (18+)
The one rule
He believes he can keep that vow. He has not, until this woman, met the woman who would test it.
What you're in for
A possessive capo who swears not to touch his wife until she asks - a restraint that becomes the slowest detonation in Chicago.
Collateral who becomes architect. Ava calculates, survives, and says yes to ruin on her own terms - a heroine who submits to nothing, redeems nothing, and exits as herself.
An Italian-American crime family, a rival's bullets, a father's final betrayal, and a Chicago winter that makes the weather on purpose.
The story
Forensic accountant Ava Lacroix has twelve hours until Christmas when she finds the lie buried in her father's books - two-point-one million dollars laundered through dummy companies for the most dangerous family in Chicago.
The FBI is one phone call away. She never makes it. Her father runs. Damiano Vitale arrives instead - the capo who takes daughters when fathers default, and does not, generally, give them back.
He keeps her: to collect the debt, to protect her from the rival family that learns her name, and to marry her in a courthouse on a Tuesday morning. He makes her one promise as the rings change hands - and he believes he can keep it.
"What begins as collateral becomes architecture. What begins as restraint becomes the slowest detonation in the city."
When Ava's fugitive father reappears with one last betrayal - steal the flash drive, clear the debt, walk free - the only question left is whether Ava is still the woman she was when she signed her name. She is not.
Read the opening
My coffee has gone cold. I notice it all at once: the bitter metal taste, the cold thermos in my hand, the quiet certainty that something is wrong.
It is two forty-seven in the small hours on the thirty-first floor of the Wrigley Building, the kind of hour when coffee should be hot and the balance sheet should sing. Tonight I drink it. Tonight I drink it because the thing I am looking at on my monitor has gone wrong six different ways in the last twenty minutes.
I knew it before I knew I knew it. The way you know somebody is about to cry from the back of a room. Eleven months at the firm, and the year-end reconciliations had always sung. My father's blue ink. Clean variances. Every penny accounted for. Tonight the books hum wrong three columns over, and I have spent two and a half hours trying to prove they don't…
About the author
V.K. Maren writes dark mafia romance for readers who want their antiheroes cold and their heroines uncrowned but never broken. Her stories run on restraint and dread - the slow detonation of a vow that should not be tested, a marriage that begins as a transaction and ends as a choice.
She writes the morally grey, the calculated, the transgressive - always with a guaranteed happily-ever-after and consequences that cost something. Set against a cold Chicago winter, The Vitale Ascension is her debut series. Mature readers only.
Read with care
Mature audiences only - 18+
Full content warnings appear before the prologue. This is dark romance: the story contains mature themes, morally grey characters, and explicit content. Read the warnings; they are there for a reason.
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