His Tainted Mercy

I am a doctor. I stitch gunshot wounds at two in the morning because nobody else in this part of the Bronx will. When they brought Matteo Vitale in, fourteen years old and bleeding out, I saved him off the books. The man who carried him in waited outside for six hours without sitting down. Capo Aurelio Carbone. Forty-four. The man the family calls when they need something erased. He paid me. Then he bought my freezer. Then a building appeared with my name on the deed. He doesn't threaten — he just quietly takes your life apart and puts it back arranged around him. I went to his restaurant to get it back and stayed for dinner. When the crew that shot Matteo came for me, he took two bullets standing in his own doorway, and I had to save his life on his kitchen table with his own knives. His Tainted Mercy is a dark age gap mafia romance with a capo, a doctor, and a slow, possessive takeover that ends with her still holding the scalpel.