A Rose for Blood: Dark Mafia Romance (A Rose Full of Thorns Book 2)

ROSALIE

The man I fell in love with paid someone to send me to his bedroom with orders to kill him.

I have seen the ledger. His name. His handwriting. The date he commissioned my death sentence.

Cesare Orsini knew who I was long before I climbed through his window.

He arranged our first meeting, anticipated my every move, and let me believe I was the one who had found him.

Now he wants me to hear his explanation.

I have a more pressing concern.

There are nine girls being held inside the organisation that trained me to kill. I know the men who guard them. I know how the building works. And I know what happens to women who try to leave.

I am going back to the place that made me a murderer.

Cesare has agreed to help me.

He also knows that the closer I get to the truth about my past, the more likely I am to discover exactly what he has done.

I should put as much distance between us as possible.

Instead, I find myself returning to his bed, letting him touch every scar I have never allowed another man to see.

And every time he kisses me, I remember that he has been keeping secrets since the moment we met.

I can survive another assignment. I am less certain I can survive finding out what my husband has done.

CESARE

Rosalie found the ledger.

I had prepared for this conversation. I knew what she would ask, what I would have to tell her, and how much of it she would hate me for.

She did not ask a single question.

She told me she was going back.

Now my wife intends to walk into an organisation that spent nineteen years teaching her how to kill, and I have agreed to let her do it.

I know what those people are capable of.

I have spent years trying to find them. I have paid men to follow their money, buried others who followed it too closely, and built an entire operation around a woman I was supposed to treat as an asset.

Somewhere along the way, I started measuring my life by whether she was coming home.

She has promised me she will return.

I have no intention of pretending that promise is enough to make me sleep.

There are nights when I want to lock every door in this house and keep her in my bed until she forgets the people waiting for her.

There are other nights when she tells me what she intends to do, and I am reminded exactly why I married her.

My enemies have discovered that Rosalie is important to me.

My family has its own secrets.

And the woman who once came into my house to kill me is preparing to put herself within reach of the people who taught her how.

I have made a great many arrangements to keep my wife alive. I am beginning to understand that she may never forgive me for all of them.

This is the second book in the A Rose Full of Thorns Series.

Reading order:

A Rose for Vengeance

A Rose for Blood

A Rose for Burial

326 pages. Kindle edition.