Held by the Capo

Andrei Volkov eats one croissant at her counter every Tuesday and never looks at her, only the door. Then the audit goes wrong, and the family's answer is a marriage: Tova Lindqvist, twenty-two, pastry chef, to the fifty-one-year-old capo who technically owns the building her grandmother has run for forty years. He tells her politely, at closing, and doesn't negotiate. Eleven weeks later she finds out he arranged the audit himself — not to trap her, but to force the council off a list her grandmother's name was on. Tova is not grateful. She is furious, and it turns out that's the first honest thing either of them has managed in a decade. A forced marriage age gap bratva romance about a lifeboat nobody told her she was in.