A dark mafia romance between two men. Rivals to lovers, forced proximity, one bed, size difference, hurt/comfort. Dual POV, open door, complete ending, no cliffhanger.
HIS POV. HIS POV. AND A CITY WITH A WIND IN IT.
For four hundred years, one house has held the private business of every family from Palermo to Odessa. The bank. The courier line. The confessional. Four centuries of other people's secrets, and not one of them ever opened.
Nico Sarto is sent to Trieste to fold that machine up gently. Find the last twenty-two couriers, buy their silence, take back their copies, leave them all alive.
ONE WRITES EVERYTHING DOWN. THE OTHER HAS NEVER WRITTEN A WORD.
I have kept the pen in other men's lives for ten years. I have beautiful handwriting and not one line of my own. I do not ask for things. A consigliere with a man is a consigliere with a handle, and I worked that out at twenty-seven and found it restful.
Then somebody starts reaching my couriers before I do, and leaving them in the water.
And there is a Russian in this city who has been following me for twenty days.
Maksim Vetrov does not write things down. He does not need to. He has come for one page out of four hundred years of them, the page with his family's name on it, and then he intends to burn the rest, because his father died at the top of a staircase in Venice nineteen years ago and the archive is the only thing that remembers why.
Two men arrive at the same door on the same night, for opposite reasons, and neither of them can do what he came to do in front of the other. So they do the only thing left. They work together. They lie to each other about everything except what they want.
And the woman who has held that line for forty years is not going to give it up, and she is right, and that is the problem. Because the archive is the peace. Burn it and you start the war it has been holding back for four centuries.
Things to know about Black Absolution
- MM dark mafia romance, dual POV, first person, present tense
- Rivals to lovers, forced proximity, one bed, size difference
- Touch starved, hurt/comfort, praise, a man who has never once asked for anything
- Open door and explicit, with consent asked for out loud every single time
- Complete ending for this couple. No cheating. No cliffhanger.
- Book two of The Black Vatican. It reads on its own, but book one is a different couple and a man-and-woman romance.
- Content warnings: organized crime; on-page violence, including a man held for questioning and a beating whose aftermath is described; the death of a loved character in an accident described as it happens; an earlier death by drowning; grief for a parent; reference to a fire, a killing and a mass drowning at sea in the past; coercion and blackmail. No sexual violence, no dubious consent, no homophobic language or conduct on the page.
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