Hostage in His House

Roman Volkov has run the Philadelphia bratva for twenty-one years, killed a man at a wedding to get there, and has never once questioned the shape of his life. Then his brother's widow dies of cancer and leaves behind a daughter, Mila, nineteen, and names Roman as her guardian. He doesn't want the job and he doesn't know what to do with a girl who plays field hockey and takes antidepressants and has never been told what her uncle actually does. So he installs her on the third floor of his house, hires a tutor, and gives her one rule: stay inside until you turn twenty-one, because a name in a will is a name on a list. She reads the mail anyway. She learns what he does. She stays. For nine months the two of them live in a house with a locked gate and a great deal of silence, and what grows between them is patient, one-sided, and exactly as fair as both of them think it is. This is an age gap, forced proximity bratva romance that ends at a courthouse door.