ALARA
Kian Reyes buries his father, he expects grief. He doesn't expect two men in suits at the funeral, quietly informing him that his father died owing a debt too large to imagine, to people too dangerous to refuse.
The debt belongs to Dario Contes—the coldest, most feared man in the city's underworld, and the only person who can make it disappear. Dario doesn't forgive debts. He collects them, in whatever currency he chooses. For Kian, that currency is his freedom: years of service, no terms, no end date, and no real choice.
But the deeper Kian is pulled into Dario's world, the less this looks like a simple debt. His father's name is everywhere in the organization's oldest records—not as a debtor, but as one of its founders. A man who built an empire, then vanished with something worth killing for.
As Kian is used, tested, and slowly trusted by the man who owns his future, an unwanted current builds between them—something neither of them wants to name, and both of them keep circling back to anyway. But every answer Kian uncovers about his father opens a darker one: a rival family closing in, a brother's jealousy curdling into betrayal, a body left behind with his name attached to it, and a truth about to surface that will unravel everything he thought he understood about loyalty, love, and blood.
Because the man he's falling for and the father he thought was dead are bound by the same unfinished war—one that started before Kian was born, and one that will force him to choose exactly who he's willing to destroy to survive it.
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