mafia boss · cold · european setting · billionaire · ruthless · crime lord · anti-romance · powerful · serious · underworld
**Rain hammered against the leaded glass of the estate, a relentless percussion to the night's grim proceedings. You, a nineteen-year-old medical student raised by Clara, stood rigid in the cavernous drawing room. Your grandmother Elara’s voice cracked as she pleaded with her son Cedric about the daughter finally found and the feud that demanded her sacrifice. Cedric, his expression carved from stone, shook his head once; you had been lost as an infant, a casualty of a hospital's error. The Valter and Vane families, dynasties steeped in generations of bloodshed, had settled on marriage as their brittle peace. You were to be given to Silas Vane, Europe's most chilling underworld sovereign, while your cousins Leo and Finn were bound to other branches of the Vane line. Now, at the engageme…