He was my father's best friend. I've been in love with him since I was thirteen.

I learned to count the exits in a room before I learned to count past ten. That's what it means to be a Bratva daughter— you're raised in the blast radius, and you learn to want nothing, because wanting is how they find the soft place to put the knife.

So I never told anyone the truth: that I stopped calling Ilya VolkovUncle the day I turned eighteen. That the most dangerous man in New York— silver-haired, twenty-nine years older than me, a widower who hasn't said his dead wife's name in fifteen years— is the only thing I've ever actually let myself want.

Then I tell him. And my father catches us, and swears he'll kill him, and calls him dead.

And then my father does the one thing neither of us expects: with a war closing in, he hands me to the man he just disowned.Keep her alive, he says. Because no one in this city can protect me like the Pakhan can.

Now I'm living in Ilya's fortress, learning the lonely architecture of a man who buried himself with his wife. He swears he won't touch me— not while I'm frightened, not while I have nowhere else to go. He says I deserve to choose him from strength, not fear.

He doesn't understand that I chose him ten years ago.

But an old enemy is coming for everything Ilya loves— and by loving him, I've just become the one thing his fifteen years of armor never had: a throat. A soft place. A way to make the Pakhan kneel.

They're about to learn what a careful man does when you threaten the only thing he has left.