These Vows That Bind Us: Series (Vol I): 1

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.