Crowned in Vice Duet: Dark Mafia Romance Bundle, Full Duet

"My father owed him everything. Azlan Zharkov asked for me."

2 BOOKS IN ONE ! FULL DUET

• Vice: Dark Mafia Romance
• Ruin: Dark Mafia Romance

 

MILA

My father thought he was settling a debt. He was handing me to the devil.

Azlan Zharkov is not a man you bargain with. He's a weapon in a tailored suit, a butcher with beautiful manners and a record full of blood. I was supposed to be temporary, an arrangement, a signature at the bottom of my father's ruin. Instead, I became the one thing he didn't plan for.

 

He stripped away my silk my music my name. He taught me how to kneel without breaking and how to burn without screaming. Every order from his mouth feels like a blade against my skin and God help me I don't always want to move away from it.

He calls me property.

He took my freedom, my dignity… and now he's reaching for the one thing I swore he'd never have. The worst part? I might let him take that too.

But the more he tightens his grip the more I realize something dangerous. Every time those frozen eyes find mine, something wicked and hungry stirs beneath my skin. 

Collateral can turn into a weapon.

This is the first book in the The Ledger of Blood and Silk Series. Reading order:

 

AZLAN

She was supposed to be a transaction. A pretty piece of power to bleed her corrupt father dry and nothing more.

Then Mila Montclair looked at me like she wanted to carve my heart out with her bare hands, and every cold, calculated thing inside me went to war with itself.

The Senator's daughter looks fragile in ruined silk but there is venom behind those hazel eyes and I tasted it the moment she tried to defy me. She trembles under my rules under my hands under my shadow and still she glares at me like she wants to set my empire on fire.

Good.

I don't want a doll. I want something that fights back.

She belongs to me now every breath every bruise every whispered protest in the dark, and she has no idea that she stopped being just debt the moment I decided she was mine. I will break her old life crush her father's illusions and teach her exactly what she is worth in my world.

And if she thinks this is captivity, she hasn't understood the game yet.

Because once she stops fighting me

she might start fighting beside me.

And that will be the moment this city learns to fear us both.

This is the first book in the Crowned in Vice Duet. Reading order: Vice, Ruin.

 

Look inside:

 

"MILA

The wipers are fighting a losing battle against the rain, thumping back and forth like a chaotic heartbeat that matches the one trying to bruise its way out of my chest.

I’m staring at the back of my father’s head, fixated on the way his sweat has started to soak through the collar of his starch-stiff white shirt.

It’s disgusting.

He smells like fear and expensive cologne—a combination that’s quickly becoming my least favorite scent in the world.

He keeps adjusting the volume on the radio. Some classical station. The violins are screeching, grating against my nerves.

He won’t look at me.

He hasn’t looked at me since we left the estate.

I dig my manicured nails into the leather armrest until I hear the distinct pop of a seam giving way.

Good.

Ruin the car. It’s the least I can do.

“Don’t look at me like that, Mila,” he says to the windshield. His voice is tight, strained. “I’m doing this to save the family name.”

“You’re selling me to a ghost, Dad. A fucking fixer.” My voice is ice, sharp enough to cut. “Do you even hear yourself?”

“It’s not a sale,” he snaps, finally glancing at the rearview mirror but focusing on my forehead, not my eyes. Coward. “It’s a temporary arrangement. A gesture of good faith.”

“Liar.”

He flinches. He actually flinches.

“It’s complicated. You don’t understand the politics of—”

“I understand that you gambled away money we didn’t have on horses that didn’t win, and now you’re using your only daughter as a meat shield.”

He turns the radio up.

The violins get louder, drowning out the sound of my breathing, which is coming too fast, too shallow.

We’re passing stacks of rusted shipping containers now. They look like iron coffins stacked four high against a gray, bleeding sky.

This is where the city goes to die.

The shipyard.

The place where things disappear.

“Sit still,” he mutters as the car slows. “It’s almost over.”

“You’re a coward. You know that? A goddamn coward.”

He hits the brakes.

The Lincoln slides on the wet concrete before coming to a stop at the end of a pier that stretches out into the black water. A single set of LED headlights cuts through the mist ahead of us, illuminating the falling rain like shards of glass.

Arthur kills the engine.

The silence that follows is heavier than the noise.

The heater dies, and the temperature inside the cabin drops instantly.

He finally turns in his seat, his face pale, eyes watery. He reaches out to touch my hair.

I jerk my head back, baring my teeth at him.

“Don’t you fucking touch me.”

“Do what he says,” he whispers. “Don’t make this harder on me.”

“On you?” I laugh, and it sounds jagged. “Whose debt is it, Arthur? Yours or mine?”

“Behave, Mila. For once in your life, think of someone other than yourself.”

The audacity. The absolute, unmitigated gall of this man.

I’m about to scream, to really let him have it, but he’s already opening his door. The wind howls in, wet and smelling of diesel and old, dead fish.

He rounds the car and yanks my door open.

“Get out.”

I don’t move.

He grabs my elbow and hauls me out.

My heel catches on the doorframe, and I stumble into the downpour. The wind catches my silk dress, plastering it to my skin instantly. It’s freezing.

I slip on a patch of oil, my heels skidding on the concrete.

Arthur’s grip tightens on my bicep, bruising the skin.

Crack.

My right heel snaps off.

I stumble, going down on one knee into a puddle of brackish water.

“Get up,” Arthur hisses, trying to pull me upright. “Don’t embarrass me.”

I kick the other shoe off, standing barefoot on the gritty, freezing concrete.

“Let go of me, you bastard!”

“Move!”

He shoves me forward.

And then I see him.

Azlan Zharkov isn’t standing in the rain.

He’s part of it."