These Vows That Bind Us (These Vows #I)

I was thirteen years old when I learned what it means to be born a woman inside the world of made men. I learned it watching my mother die at the hands of brutality. In this world, women are not protected. We are positioned. Moved like pieces across a board by hands that call it love, call it tradition, call it family.

I learned that softness is a liability. That the only thing more dangerous than being born into this life is being born into it without power.

My father spent years keeping me far from New York—burying me in the quiet of Palermo, where I learned to shape clay and create beauty instead of survive violence. Now he's dead, and I'm standing in the city he kept me from for a decade, dragged back into a war I never started, confronted with horrors I was never supposed to survive long enough to understand.

The blood feuds. The violence. The betrayals.

My uncle tells me I'm to marry the enemy. A union meant to end a feud built on the bones of everything I have already lost. Santo D'Amico... the man with dark eyes I have seen before. The man who looked at me like I was someone worth knowing... and was lying through every moment of it.

He wants my heart. My uncle wants my loyalty.

Both want to use me for a war I never chose and was never supposed to survive.

But I am not my mother, and clay hardens under heat.

I have been burning for a very long time.

This is volume one in the These Vows series, a dark, enemies to lovers mafia romance.