Cruel King: The Marchetti Dynasty Book Two

They crowned him king. They married me to him to cut his throat.

For nine years I sharpened the same knife. Every Tuesday. On the same small stone. For the man whose family put a bullet in my mother on a marble front step.

Then the four families voted. They handed me to his son.

I walked into Niccolò Castellano's house in his dead mother's wedding dress, with that knife in my bag and thirty days to use it.

He knew before I crossed the threshold.

He didn't take the blade. He set a chair on the other side of my door and swore he wouldn't sleep for thirty nights. He let me keep the knife under my pillow. He never once asked me to put it down.

A king who hands his wife the weapon meant for his own throat. Then waits.

On the second night he tells me one thing that cracks nine years of certainty wide open. My father lied. The man who killed my mother is not the man I came here to kill.

Thirty days to decide whether to lower the knife.

I'm terrified it won't be the knife I surrender first.

Dark mafia romance. Arranged marriage, enemies to lovers, slow-burn obsession, high heat. Book Two of The Marchetti Dynasty.