Romans Mystery Mafia & Histoires Second Chance

Tavian Veyr owns a shipping empire, commands Bellacosta’s most feared crime family, and can buy almost anything except the feeling that he deserves to exist. Since witnessing his mother’s murder as a boy, he has lived by one conviction: everyone he loves becomes someone he fails. Then Ilyra Vale walks into his abandoned conservatory and tells him his roof is falling apart. A gifted art conservator with little patience for powerful men, Ilyra is hired to restore the last place Tavian remembers his mother alive. Their uneasy partnership becomes a refuge neither expected. Through arguments, quiet meals, and memories uncovered beneath damaged paint, Tavian begins imagining a life beyond the empire that raised him. But Ilyra carries a truth that could destroy that future. Her father killed his mother. She has known for years. What began as fear becomes something uglier when she falls in love: a desperate willingness to postpone the confession that might cost her the only man who has ever truly seen her. As an anonymous woman calling herself Moth sends fragments of the past, a stranger known as Peregrine begins dismantling the family’s protected history. Both have reasons to want the truth exposed. Neither intends to leave Tavian’s world intact. When the secret finally breaks, love cannot erase complicity, and revenge cannot restore the dead. With his empire turning against him and Ilyra forced to choose whom she will betray, Tavian must decide whether loving his enemy’s daughter is his greatest weakness or his first freedom.