The night Alessandro Vanetti walked into Rosalina’s Italian Restaurant, Natalie Cordero was just trying to survive her shift. Her grandmother was sick. Her rent was late. And the man in the thousand-dollar suit with whiskey-colored eyes and blood on his hands looked at her like she was the first living thing he had seen in four hundred years.
Alessandro is the don of the Vanetti syndicate, the most powerful wolf shifter in the eastern United States, and a man running out of time. A curse in his bloodline has been killing his family for centuries, and the madness is already whispering at the edges of his mind. He has given up on a cure. He has given up on anything except the slow grey death waiting for him at the end of a very long life.
Then he meets a waitress with a sharp tongue and a tattoo she does not understand, and the wolf inside him goes still for the first time in three hundred years.
Nat does not know what she is. She does not know about the hidden world of shifters and seers and death-touched bloodlines that exists beneath the surface of her city. She does not know why she survived the car accident that killed her mother. She does not know why she has never been sick a day in her life. She only knows that the dangerous man who keeps coming to her restaurant makes her feel seen in a way no one ever has.
But her grandmother Rosa has been keeping a secret for three decades. A secret about a bargain struck with Death himself in a small Italian village in 1672. A secret about the Mortaia, the death-touched women who carry the mark of that bargain in their blood. And a secret about what Nat really is.
When the truth comes out, Nat faces an impossible choice. She can walk away and live forever, untouched by time, watching Alessandro’s family die one by one. Or she can give up her immortality to break the curse that is killing him, knowing it might kill her too.
Some bonds are written in blood. Some curses can only be broken by love.
And some monsters are worth dying for.
18+
