Novels by Mileah

MineSeraphina & Declan — Wedding Night✦✦ explicit content — 18+ ✦We get back to the suite at half past midnight and I am still running the names in my head.Three of them. I've had them since the moment Caruso said the Ghost — the word landed and three faces surfaced immediately, unbidden, the way the right answer always surfaces when you've been building toward it for long enough. I've been sitting with all three for the last two hours in the car, at the safe house, across the table from a man with a broken finger and everything he knew laid out between us. Running the architecture. Testing each name against the network map. Eliminating.Two of them I can eliminate with another forty-eight hours of work.The third one I cannot eliminate. And it is the one that sits wrong in my chest.Declan closes the suite door behind us. He's watching me — he does this, I've learned, when he knows I'm working through something and is deciding whether to wait or push. He usually waits. It's

Seraphina & Declan✦ 18+ — explicit language, graphic violence, torture ✦The basement smells like concrete and old water and the particular kind of fear that has been marinating for several hours. I know that smell. I've been in rooms like this before — not many, and not as the one asking questions, but enough to understand the architecture of them. The single hanging bulb. The drain in the floor that doesn't try to hide what it's for. The chair bolted to the concrete, which is a practical detail that tells you something about whoever built this room and how seriously they took their work. Declan built this room. Of course he did. The man in the chair is named Caruso. Nico Caruso, forty-three, mid-level in the operation that's been bleeding both our families for eight months. He is not the architect — I know that, Declan knows that — but he is the closest link we've been able to put hands on and he knows things, and I need those things, and he is going to give them to me.He just

S e r a p h i n aThe reception venue is a converted warehouse in Tribecathat my mother transformed into something that looks likeit costs twice what it does, which has always been Elena Conti's specific genius. Candles everywhere. Dark florals — deep red roses and black callalilies, my mother compromised on the traditional and the gothic and somehow landed on something that looks intentional and stunning.Circular tables draped in black linen. An open bar that Fergus Callahan located within approximately forty-five seconds of arrival,which I respect. I'm standing at the edge of the dance floor watching the room do whatrooms full of powerful people in fragile alliances always do — perform warmth while measuring distances — when I notice Siobhan.She's talking to Matteo. My oldest brother, twenty-nine, who has my father's coloring and mymother's composure and an unfortunate habit of being charming to everyone except the people he's supposed to be charming to. He's standing slight

D e c l a nI’ve been told the dress is red. Siobhan told me, because Siobhan tells me everything eventually,usually delivered with the specific energy of someone who has information they know you want and has waited for maximum impact before deploying it. "Red," she said. "You're welcome. You owe me." She didn't tell me anything else. I didn't ask for anything else. Some things are better walked into without preparation. I'm standing at the end of the aisle in a church that the Conti family has attended for four generations, in a suit that cost more than most people's cars, and I am for the $rst time in recent memory actually nervous. Not about the alliance. Not about the marriage as a strategic structure. Not about any of the things I've spent three months planning around.About her. The doors open. The entire room exhales. I feel it — that collective shi! of attention,I’ve hundred people all turning at once. And then I see her and every thought I've had in the last ten seconds d

S e r a p h i n a✦Four women in a bridal atelier on the Upper East Side and only two of us are actually getting married, which means the power dynamic in this room is not what the staff assumes. My mother has an agenda: something classic, something long,something that will photograph well and signal the correct things to the correct people. She communicates this agenda nonverbally throughthe selection of gowns she steers me toward — all of them beautiful, all of them white or ivory or the palest possible blush, all of themcommunicating exactly nothing about who I actually am. Maeve Callahan sits in the armchair with a glass of champagne shehasn't touched and watches everything. She doesn't offer opinions until she has something worth saying. I respect that about herconsiderably. She and I have something in common that neither of us has acknowledged aloud: we are both very good at watching.Siobhan is a disaster. A delightful, extremely useful disaster. She has pulled three gown

Seraphina My mother has been waiting her entire life for thismoment and I am not going to survive it.It started the morning a!er the engagement dinner. A single phone call at 8 a.m. — which is my mother's version of a polite hour -andby nine she had a notebook, a color-coded timeline, the private numbers of four Manhattan venues, and a vision board. An actualvision board, assembled from magazines she apparently keeps specifically for this purpose. I did not know she kept magazines for this purpose. I should have known. I should have planned better.Within forty-eight hours, Elena Conti had absorbed the wedding planning in the manner of a beautiful, elegant, completely unstoppable force of nature. Maeve Callahan — who I expected to resist, because she seems like a woman who resists most things —arrived at our townhouse on a Tuesday afternoon, sat down across from my mother at the kitchen table, and in approximately fourminutes they had determined between them that this wedding wo