Marco Vitelli has been in the family fourteen years. He has built himself into the kind of man who doesn’t react — not because he can’t feel things, but because the work has always required a version of himself that processes everything privately and presents nothing. His pulse runs at sixty-two beats per minute. He is at a table in Osteria Lombarda making a ceasefire deal and everything is under control.
Then Sal Ferrante walks in two steps ahead of the omega, and Marco’s wolf does something it has not done in thirty-four years of careful management.
Luca is the collateral. The formal language of the arrangement is that he stays with the Vitelli family for the duration of the ceasefire as a guarantee of Ferrante compliance. Marco’s wolf is reading a different document entirely — one that arrived without being asked and is now occupying the seventy percent of his attention that should be on the negotiation.
Luca is lean, sharp at the jaw, wearing pharmaceutical scent-masking over something that found the lock Marco didn’t know he had. He meets Marco’s eyes across the negotiation table and holds them just long enough to make clear that flinching is a choice he’s not making. Then he looks away — not submission. Strategy.
Marco signs the collateral clause because the alternative is Sal walking out and a six-month ceasefire collapsing into a war that kills people. He signs it knowing his wolf has already made a decision he has not authorized and is not going to be consulted on.
Six months. A ceasefire, a collateral arrangement, and two men who arrived as adversaries and are going to have to decide what to do with the fact that adversaries is no longer sufficient as a category.
Rich with mafia atmosphere, genuinely hot, and character-driven in a way that earns its emotional payoff. If MM shifter mpreg romance with a possessive alpha who doesn’t lose control cheaply and an omega who refuses to perform submission is what you’re after, this is the one. Read it now.
