NATALIA
I've been good my whole life. One night, I wasn't.
One night, in a black skirt that wasn't mine, in a club on the Drepano road with a burning skull on its roof, I closed my eyes and danced like nobody was watching.
Somebody was.
He watched me from the balcony. Three nights later he was standing in my bedroom while I slept.
He took me out of my mother's kitchen with a gun beside his plate. He sent my family across the sea to a place I'm not allowed to know. He says I can have anything I want, except the one thing I ask for.
He's cruel. He's a killer. He fills my balcony with roses.
And every night, in his bed, he waits for me to say one word.
I'd rather die than say it. I'd rather die than let him see how badly I want to.
SALVATORE
I don't ask. I take. It's the only thing anybody ever taught me.
I run the Italian trade through a Greek port, and in three years nobody has found a single thing to hold a knife to.
Then a girl with a braid down to her spine closed her eyes on my dance floor, and I stopped counting the doors.
She hates me. She has every reason. She'll run, and I'll bring her back. She'll lie to me, badly. She'll look at the knife on my nightstand while I sleep.
Every man who wants my port wants her now. The man I answer to wants her gone.
Let them come.
She's mine. And I have never once given back what's mine.
This is the first book in The Monster's Heart Series. Reading order:
Cruel Monster.
Sinful Monster.
