Showing results by author "Faye Byrd" in All Categories

My acts are vicious and cruel, vile and life-taking. My demands are unquestioned no matter how depraved. There’s a monster inside me, and the wounds that scar my soul are dark and deep. I’m Dante Simone. Underboss of the Chicago outfit. She walks into the audition, eyes snapping with a fire that could cost her life - if she were to unleash it. Piper Tate crawls beneath my skin on our first encounter. Her audition, a condition of employment I’ve sat through a thousand times, is like no other. It’s magnetic, cementing my traitorous eyes to her lithe form. 

Piper Tate has cast a spell, making me into a man who blurts Italian endearments without thought. One who gives her full thumbprint access to my penthouse. A guy who makes her breakfast and serves it to her in my bed, even though it drives me crazy. She’s taken care of me - something I never thought I needed. And yet, when she uses that access, I bail.

Rapture is my stomping grounds. The place where all my depravity originates. It isn't that I want to live this way. It's that my normal life disappeared years ago. I'm a hollow man, trying my best to fight off the nothingness that threatens me every waking hour. But one night, it all catches up to me. I barge into her life like a criminal on the run, pleading for her to tend my wounds. The pretty vet across the back alley from Rapture is everything I'm not. Smart. Talented. Driven. Good. She's out of my league, yet I don't want to let her go.

Answers. They’re hard to come by. The way the Outfit obtained them rocked us to our very core, but we’re overcoming the loss and looking ahead. The war is here, and preparations will take Piper and me to Boston and into a meeting with the other American Mafia organizations. Except a single call renders the meeting null and void. An attack has taken place in Chicago that results in Madeline’s kidnapping. Miami is responsible. They will be eliminated. And I’ll be the one to see it done.

With the shitshow in Miami behind us, Piper is finally mine. I'm on the brink of accepting something I never thought possible. I think I'm falling in love, but how would I know? The monster's never allowed such emotion to fester, and he doesn't find this instance to be an exception. He lays down the law. If Piper's going to love me, she has to accept him, too.