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The first time he asked my name, I gave him the wrong one. The second time, I gave him a different one. The third time, I told him the truth, and forty-eight hours later my mother’s killer was at the door, holding the only photograph I had left.
My name is Lucia. I have been a daughter of dead women for twenty-four years. I have been wearing names that were not mine since I was six. I had four passports and forty-eight hours and a route through Vermont memorized off the back of a stolen AAA map when a detective named Davey knocked on the wrong door, and the right one.
He was the kind of cop who made a habit of being spellable. The kind of man who showed up at his mother’s grave alone. The kind of man who let me walk out of an interrogation room because he had decided, before I sat down across from him, that he was not going to make me lie to him.
And when the woman who took me at six showed up in his apartment with a daisy on the counter and a train ticket for noon Saturday and a quiet little condition the price of which was the rest of my life, Davey was the one who carried the duffel out of my hand at the door. Who held my hand for three hours in the Tahoe to a kitchen in a town in Maine I had never been to. Who lay down with me on the bed in a spare room where a woman I’d never met had already taken the clock off the wall, and kissed the scars without asking.
He did not tell me he was about to resign. He did not tell me he was about to walk me into a kitchen in Calabria ahead of him to meet the woman who had been keeping me alive my whole life.
He just took the duffel out of my hand at the door, and let me decide what I was going to do when we got to the end of the road.
I decided. I am still deciding.
Dark Italian mafia romance. Cop and criminal. Forced proximity. Found family. Forced identity. Possessive alpha. Witness protection.
Stolen Name is Book 1 of Ruthless Empire, a dark, Italian-mob, cop-and-criminal, found-family, forced-identity, possessive-alpha-by-carrying romance from new author Adriana Vex. For readers of Danielle Lori, Cora Reilly, Rina Kent, Sophie Lark, Ana Huang, Neva Altaj, Penelope Sky, and Parker S. Huntington. 111,000 words. Spicy. Standalone HEA with series read-through to Book 2.