Man, this hunt feels familiar. Years back, it was all sketchy third-party aggregator sites with a million pop-ups and dubious translations. The legitimate landscape has shifted, though not towards what you'd call abundance.
I stumbled on a lot of reads via my library's digital partnerships, especially Hoopla. They've got a surprising catalog from imprints like After Glows or those indie-published authors who write super gritty stuff. Think less sweeping family sagas and more brutal, street-level power grabs. The selection rotates, so you gotta check back.
Honestly, the 'free' part often means you're reading someone's early work or a serial they're building an audience with. Webnovel platforms like Wattpad or Inkitt have entire tags for 'Mafia' and 'Crime Romance,' but the intensity of the crime plots there varies wildly. You'll need to sift through a lot of 'bad boy with a secret heart of gold' tropes to find the genuinely ruthless, plot-driven stories.