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Ruler's Obsession
A Dark Mafia Romance Of Forbidden Desire, Dangerous Secrets, And A Possessive Alpha Who Will Never Let Her Go
She has spent her career reading the truth in things that cannot speak for themselves.
She was not expecting to meet a man she couldn't read at all. Valentina Greco is one of southern Italy's most precise provenance specialists she authenticates art, recovers buried histories, and sees through forgeries that fool everyone else. When a betrayal by the man she trusted costs her both her engagement and her career in a single morning, she flees to Rome with nothing but her tools and her professional instincts still intact.
At a private auction near Piazza Navona, she corrects an auctioneer's attribution under her breath and the man standing two feet to her left hears her. He buys the piece before she finishes speaking.
Salvatore Vitale is the fifth-generation head of an ancient Sicilian crime dynasty. His family has controlled the movement of art and antiquities across southern Italy since the 1820s. He runs a legitimate gallery on three continents and a network beneath it that operates by laws his great-grandfather wrote. He does not attend auctions to bid. He attends to remind the room who owns it. He has never pursued a woman in his life. He pursues Valentina.
With the focused patience of a man accustomed to acquiring things no one else can price and the barely concealed hunger of someone who did not expect to want anything this badly, this fast.
He shows up at her cafe. He has her attribution verified overnight. He invites her to walk a collection that no one outside his family has ever been permitted to enter. And she goes. Because he is the first person in years who has told her the truth about what he is, and truth, she has learned, is rarer and more dangerous than any forgery she has ever handled.
But the Vitale Dynasty has a secret buried twenty-two years in its past
a provenance fraud, a stolen authentication, a name on a document that shouldn't bear it. A secret that connects, with the specific cruelty of coincidence, directly to the foundation where Valentina built her career.
The closer she gets to Salvatore, the closer she gets to what his family has been hiding.
And when the full truth surfaces, it will demand a choice that is neither clean nor comfortable from a woman who has already paid once for someone else's deception. He inherited an empire. She can read its secrets. Neither of them expected what the other would cost.
