HO PE
LOVE AND DEATH
LOVE AND DEATH
Cael Russo was nine years old when he watched his father die.
He did not see a murder that night. He saw a man kneel, and another man pull the trigger, and a boy's entire world collapse in the space of a single second. The man who pulled the trigger was Adrian Frost, the most feared crime lord in the city. The boy who watched from behind a cracked door grew up eating at Adrian's table, sleeping under Adrian's roof, and hating every single second of it.
For fifteen years Cael has been waiting.
He had being learning. Becoming exactly the kind of dangerous that Adrian never saw coming. He knows every weakness, every pressure point, every name in every deal. He has one plan, one goal, one reason to keep breathing inside that house.
Burn it to the ground.
Then Lucian Ashford comes home.
Adrian's only son is nothing like his father, which is the most inconvenient thing Cael has ever encountered. He is perceptive and warm and infuriatingly impossible to manipulate, and the seduction that was supposed to be Cael's fastest route to the ledger that will destroy everything keeps going in directions he did not plan for. Lucian was supposed to be a target. He was never supposed to see through every wall Cael has ever built and choose him anyway.
Now Cael is running out of mission and running out of reasons to leave, and the truth about everything, about Adrian, about his father, about the fifteen years of grief he has been aiming in the wrong direction, is about to detonate what is left of the life he built around his revenge.
He came here to destroy a family.
He never planned to become part of one.
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