Sweet Vice: Dark Mafia Romance

MILA

In three weeks I marry a man I have met eleven times.

It ends a nine year war, which everybody keeps telling me is a beautiful thing to be. My father says I am lucky. My aunts say I am lucky. Roman Tarasov buys out my café every Tuesday and kisses me in the doorway where the whole avenue can see it, and I am the luckiest girl in Brighton Beach.

I have never said no to anybody in my life.

Nobody has ever asked me anything I could say it to.

Then Lev Zolotov walks into my engagement party, which he was not invited to, and takes the tray out of my hands in front of two hundred people, and says my mother's name out loud.

Nobody has said my mother's name in twelve years.

He owns the candy factory on West 8th and most of the avenue it stands on. He is the reason women in this neighbourhood cross the street. And he has decided, for reasons no one has bothered to explain to me, that this wedding is not going to happen.

The problem is not that he frightens me. He does. Everybody knows to be frightened of him and I am not special.

The problem is that he is the first person in my life who asked me a question and then waited for the answer.

LEV

I went to look at a problem.

The Malakhov girl is a treaty with her hair up. Her father is selling her to Rego Park, and in three weeks I will have Tarasovs on both sides of me, and I have three ways to stop it. Two of them are murder.

So I went to look at her. That is all I went to do.

She was carrying a tray at her own engagement party. Two hundred people in that room and not one of them had noticed that the bride would not sit down.

I noticed.

I have not stopped.

I have not tasted anything in fifteen years. Somebody put something in my food when I was nineteen, and my father never mentioned it again, and I have run a candy company on nothing but watching other men's faces ever since. Nobody in this city knows. She worked it out in four minutes, over a cold plate, and she has not told a soul.

All of Brighton Beach is waiting to see what I do about this wedding.

I am not going to stop it.

I am going to marry her first.

This is the first book in The Sugar & Vice series. Reading order:

Sweet Vice.

Savage Vice.

Deadly Vice.