Ruthless in Red: She Came to Kill Him. She Stayed to Love Him.
She came to his ballroom in a red dress with a knife on her thigh and orders to end his life before midnight. He caught her wrist before she cleared the draw. He didn't have her killed. Neither of them has recovered from that decision.
Kira Volkov has been a weapon since she was seven years old. Bratva-trained, five languages with no accent in any of them, fourteen kills in ten years - she is precise and cold and very good at the work. She walked into Don Matteo Castellano's estate in Milan as the best assassin Viktor Petrov had ever produced. She walked in knowing the exit routes, the camera blind spots, the twelve seconds from decision to completion. She had practiced the job forty times in a hotel room.
She had not practiced for a man who caught her wrist and smiled like he had been waiting for her.
Matteo Castellano has survived four assassination attempts in nine years by being the kind of man who waits longest in the room. When the woman in the red dress is brought before him, his consigliere argues twice for her death. Matteo disagrees twice. He does not entirely know why. He knows she is Bratva. He knows she is calculating an escape from every room he puts her in. He knows she has something keeping her in that organization that is not loyalty and not money - something or someone - and that the full picture is more interesting than any of the obvious approaches.
He brings her coffee. He asks questions she doesn't answer. He waits.
She is waiting too. For an opening, for a reason, for the moment the situation changes into something she can navigate. Instead she finds a woman in a library who sees her clearly in thirty seconds and asks for nothing. A man who sits outside her door in the dark. Scars that match hers. A plan, a sister, and a Don who puts his own resources into a rescue she has been building toward for four years - and asks, afterward, for nothing but the truth.
The truth is more dangerous than the knife was.
"Ruthless in Red" is a complete, standalone dark romance set in the Italian mafia. Assassin-to-lovers. Captive-to-lovers. A Bratva-trained weapon learning, for the first time, what it feels like to be seen. A Don who decided to find out what was underneath the blade and built his life around the answer. A consigliere whose suspicion becomes the most useful thing in the room. A sister who survives. A house that becomes a home. And a woman who arrived in red and stayed - not because she had nowhere else to go, but because she finally chose.
For readers who love: Italian mafia romance, enemies-to-lovers, captive-to-lovers, dark romance, Bratva heroines, slow burn, morally complex heroes, found family, and love stories that begin at the wrong end of a knife.
Customer Reviews
ThriftBooks ® and the ThriftBooks ® logo are registered trademarks of Thrift Books Global, LLC
