The Kingpin's Vow

The briefing was three days ago in a cramped office in the Federal Building, with a wheezing air conditioner and a dead plant on the desk. David Park made it sound like nothing. You are a courier. You hand him the drive, you get the signature, you walk out. The drive holds decoy files. There is no backup and no extraction plan. Elena Torres took the job because of a tattoo. Her brother Leo was found in an alley off Lawrence Avenue with three bullets in his chest and his hands zip-tied behind him, and the case went cold in six weeks. She had traced that badly inked anchor on his arm the night before he died and told him it looked like a fork. He had insisted it was a symbol of hope. The man who is supposed to sign for the package runs his business out of a nightclub with Cyrillic letters glowing over the door. What Elena does not expect is that Dmitri Volkov will not simply have her killed. He searches her bag. He finds what is in it. He knows she has lied to him for weeks, and she is still standing there, and when she asks him why, he says it is because she did not run. What she does not expect either is the photograph on his desk. Mila is his daughter, lives with her mother in Oak Park, and gets Thursdays. The deal they strike is blunt: her skills for his permission to look inside his own organisation. And what that permission turns up is not the clean story either of them wanted. Dmitri ordered a man killed on evidence he now believes was fabricated, and the fabrication came from somewhere very close to his own kitchen table. There is a brother in this book, and he is not the love interest. Viktor is Dmitri's, and Viktor has been talking to the Kuzmin family. A dark mafia romance about a woman investigating a murder inside the organisation she blames for it, a man who has spent his life delegating the things he cannot be tied to, and a child's birthday cake with six candles jammed in at different angles. The romance is closed-door, and the last scene is a grandmother on the porch holding a wrapped gift and waiting for permission to come in.