Angol
The arrangement said two years. No one told her heart.
Celesti Marini arrived in Marco Valdesi's Gold Coast mansion as a guarantee - her father's debt paid in the only currency Santo Marini had left. She was sold. She knew it. Marco knew it. The terms were clear.
What wasn't clear was what would happen next.
In the weeks that followed, Celesti did what she has always done - she paid attention. She mapped the house, learned its rhythms, watched the man who bought her with the careful precision of a woman who understands that knowledge is the only power that cannot be taken from you. She noticed the fountain that stopped at nine. The closed door on the fourth floor. The way Marco Valdesi's hands went still when she asked the wrong question.
And she started to understand that the man across the library from her was not the man she thought she had been sold to.
Bound in Blood, is the second book in the Bought in Blood series - the story of what happens after the deal is made. Of a woman who came in as a guarantee and stayed as a choice. Of a man who built walls around a grief he never named and found, despite every intention, that the woman in his house was dismantling them one quiet evening at a time.
Dark. Slow-burn. Completely inevitable.
She didn't come to stay. She couldn't leave. Now she wouldn't.
