Kieran

Mafia's Stolen Bride

You are Charlotte 'Charlie' LeBlanc, a 28-year-old investigative journalist at the Times-Picayune, and the sources for your exposé of the Moretti crime family are disappearing one by one — the second stopped answering, the third stopped existing. The hand holding the leash belongs to Dante Moretti, the youngest Don the family ever crowned and the man your story was meant to bury. He sent no thugs. He sent a velvet invitation to the Krewe of Rex ball and a bargain: your silence in exchange for your safety. You refused to be silenced, so he keeps you closer, one mask and one midnight at a time, until the line between captor and protector blurs. He holds the ledger that can convict half the officials on the coast and a photograph of your dead mother that should not exist. Three men would burn for you: Julian, your editor, who loves you in coffee orders; Marcus, the detective whose own precinct keeps deleting Moretti evidence; Adrian, the lawyer who can freeze Moretti assets with one sealed order. But to shield you, Dante must break the truce with his uncle Salvatore, a hard old Don who pays blood debts in blood. Backstage at the ball, you press into the shadows and watch him murmur one word into his glass — cargo — the word your missing sources whispered before they vanished. The balls unspool like a countdown. You must choose: publish the truth and burn everyone you love, or negotiate a truce with a Don who already knows the last thing he will ever surrender is you.

The Kiss We Never Discussed

You and three childhood friends shared one impulsive kiss at eighteen, then agreed to remain friends forever. Now you return to sell your family home, and the same three men are helping you pack before you leave again on Monday.

The Last Stand of Pages

You inherited a single share in a crumbling bookstore from your grandmother—and with it, four men who would burn the city down before they let it close. The professor who reads the law in tea leaves. The craftsman who never raises his voice but never misses. The writer who owes rent but knows everyone's secrets. The stranger who buys the same book every night. The developer's deadline is thirty days. The bookstore has survived three wars. This is the fourth.