Angol
Rafael Castellani has spent nineteen years becoming the perfect weapon. Cillian Brannigan has spent twenty-seven becoming useful enough to survive.
A truce between two Chicago crime families should be simple: Rafe marries a Brannigan daughter, the war ends, and everyone keeps breathing. Then an old clause puts her younger brother under Rafe's roof as collateral.
Cillian is the family's bookkeeper: sharp-tongued, impossible to intimidate, and carrying a secret that would get him killed if the wrong men discovered it. Every Friday, behind a mask at a hidden club called the Aviary, he gets a few hours to belong to no family, owe no one anything, and want what he wants.
Rafe is supposed to protect him.
He is not supposed to want him.
Fourteen steps separate their bedroom doors. Soon that distance becomes the most dangerous thing in the house. Stolen nights turn into something neither man can file away, and when someone takes photographs, desire becomes evidence.
In their world, being exposed is not a scandal. It is a death sentence.
To survive, Rafe and Cillian will have to decide whether protection without choice is just another cage - and how much of the lives built for them they are willing to burn for the right to choose each other.
Some cages are built to keep a man in. Others are built so no one can see what he is trying to escape.
