He has one rule. It has kept his empire alive for twenty-three years.Never let anything become valuable enough to lose.
Dmitri Zolotov built an empire out of his father’s wreckage when he was twenty-four years old, and spent the next twenty-three years turning it into something nine figures deep and untouchable, specifically so nothing that unstable could ever happen to anyone he loved again. He hasn’t taken a personal day in fifteen years. He orders the same dish at the same restaurant without looking at the menu, reads every exit before he sits down, and keeps the one photograph of his parents he owns face-down in a drawer where no one can ask about it. He didn’t choose to be alone. He chose safety, over and over, until it stopped feeling like a choice at all.
Then a wedding planner walks into his gala walkthrough mid-checklist, hands him a clipboard, and puts him to work moving folding tables, all without once recognizing the man half of Chicago calls a reputed boss and means as a warning.
Cora Walsh isn’t looking for a mob boss. She’s looking to keep the business she built out of a forty-thousand-dollar loan and pure stubbornness from going under, and the contract to run Dmitri Zolotov’s twentieth-anniversary alliance summit is the biggest her company has ever landed. She is not here to notice how carefully he watches a room, or how much safer she feels standing in it because of him. She is definitely not supposed to be the reason he starts doing reckless things for the first time in fifteen years.
But the same vendor system that built Cora’s reputation becomes the exact route his own cousin uses to stage a coup at the summit, and the world it drags her into puts everyone she loves, including her own brother, on a very short list of people worth threatening. Now she knows too much to walk away clean, and the same man who spent twenty-three years making sure nobody could get close enough to use against him is the one who taught her every hallway of it. Now Dmitri has to choose between the rule that built his empire and the woman already standing inside it.
He built that empire to make sure he’d never lose anyone again.
He never planned on the one reckless risk that felt like the only sane thing he’d done in twenty-three years. 
