The Devil Who Watched Me: A Dark Mafia Stalker Forced Marriage Romance (Dark Mafia Keepers Book 1)

Isabella Arden restores damaged art for a living. She never expected a smoke-scarred portrait to expose a murder—or the man who has been watching her for six months.

Hidden beneath the painting is a message from her dead mentor. He did not die in an accident. Someone inside a powerful criminal family silenced him, and the stranger who has been following Isabella may know why.

Before she can uncover the rest of the warning, armed men invade her studio.

Nikolai Volkov arrives through the darkness with a gun, a dangerous family name, and impossible knowledge of Isabella’s life. He knows when she leaves home. Which train she takes in the rain. Where she goes when grief becomes too heavy. He has studied every part of her world long before she ever learned his name.

Now that world is collapsing.

A betrayal inside the Volkov empire has placed Isabella directly in the path of a criminal war. Her apartment has been searched. Her closest friend has been taken. The police may already be compromised. Nikolai claims there is only one status powerful enough to make his enemies fear touching her.

His wife.

The marriage is supposed to be protection. Isabella knows it is also the cage Nikolai has been preparing for her all along.

Inside his fortified estate, she discovers a private conservation studio built according to her exact habits, a damaged portrait containing only half the evidence, and a husband whose obsession runs deeper than surveillance. Nikolai will lie, threaten, and kill to keep her alive—but he cannot understand that survival without freedom is only another form of captivity.

As Isabella searches for the missing evidence, every clue pulls her further into the Volkov family’s secrets. Every answer makes her husband more dangerous. And every forbidden moment between them blurs the line between protection and possession, fear and desire, the monster she should escape and the man willing to destroy his own empire for her.

Because the enemy already knows what Isabella found.

And before the truth is exposed, Nikolai will have to make an impossible choice: keep the woman he has watched for six months—or finally open the door and trust her to choose him.

The Devil Who Watched Me is a complete standalone novel with an emotionally intense, hard-won romantic ending.