A Kill for a Kiss

Catalina Rivas killed her first man at nineteen and has run her family's southern territory since. Bruno Gallo killed his at seventeen and has spent a decade pretending he's the reasonable one. Their families have been at war over a stretch of highway. The old men broker peace the usual way: Catalina marries Bruno, the highway gets split, and neither of them gets a say. They argue about everything. Dinner. Death. The east wing. Whether Bruno's new hotel is a front or a future. Then a truck burns on the highway with two cousins inside, and both families start loading guns. Catalina and Bruno have to work together for the first time to prove it was a third party — and they come back from a motel on the state line with the broker's ledger and one shared gun. At the peace table, they present it as one voice, cancel the renegotiation clause, and move into a house on the highway neither family owns. Their families are furious. They are not.