“Three Costa brothers built an empire on control. Three women walked into it as debt, intruder, and threat — and walked out as its sovereigns.”
The Costa syndicate is the most powerful crime empire in New York — a fortress of sealed treaties, surveillance architecture, and the archaic mandates of the Commission that governs the underworld. Across the trilogy, three Costa brothers — the architect who runs the empire, the intelligence director who reads its data, and the enforcer who is its blunt instrument — each take possession of a woman the Commission delivered, the syndicate caught, or the family could not afford to let walk away.
An art restorer traded as a collateral bride. A ghost cryptographer caught inside the mainframe. An investigative journalist with three years of evidence in an analog lockbox. Each is a controlled variable the Costas were never supposed to fall for — and each, by the end of her book, stops being the thing the syndicate owns and becomes the thing it answers to.
Running beneath all three: the Commission’s own agenda, and Silvio Marchetti, the rival the trilogy is built to tear down.
Book One — The Syndicate’s Vow (Vittoria & Lorenzo)
“She was the debt. He became the devotee.”
Art restorer Vittoria Rossi has spent her life preserving the fragile and the irreplaceable — centuries-old canvases, historical pigments, the careful archaeology of beauty buried under grime. She understands what it means to work with something precious. What she doesn’t know is that she is about to become one.
When the Costa syndicate wins its war against her father, the surrender terms include her. Traded as a collateral bride to satisfy an archaic Commission mandate, Vittoria is delivered to Lorenzo Costa — billionaire architect of New York’s most powerful crime empire, and the coldest mind she has ever stood opposite.
Lorenzo doesn’t want a wife. He wants a controlled variable and a sealed treaty. What he gets is a woman who will shatter his priceless antiquities rather than be treated like one, who will run — twice — and who will map the perimeter of his fortress with the same methodical focus she brings to restoration work. When fabricated evidence makes Vittoria believe Lorenzo has ordered the destruction of everything she loves, she will have to decide whether the man who bought her is also the man who would burn the entire underworld to keep her safe.
Alternating First Person (Vittoria & Lorenzo) • HEA
Book Two — The Syndicate’s Defiance (Elena & Dante)
“She broke into his empire. He refused to let her leave.”
Cryptographer Elena Vargas has been a ghost for six years. She steals encrypted financial data from organisations powerful enough to have her killed, and she disappears before they know she was there. She has never been caught. She has never needed anyone. She operates alone because alone is the only configuration that keeps her alive.
The Costa syndicate’s mainframe is her most ambitious target. The infiltration goes flawlessly — until the server warehouse goes dark and Dante Costa steps out of the shadows. The syndicate’s intelligence director should execute her. He doesn’t. He recognises her, and a cold calculation becomes something he did not plan for.
Dante builds a cage that functions nothing like the ones Elena has escaped before. He doesn’t take her technology — he replaces it with something more disorienting: rules, structure, consent, and the specific, terrifying relief of someone who will carry the weight she has been holding alone for twenty-six years. The most ambitious target of her career turns out to be the one cage she was never trained to pick — the one she has to choose to stay inside.
Alternating First Person (Elena & Dante) • HEA
Book Three — The Syndicate’s Obsession (Clara & Matteo) • Series Finale
“She came to expose them. She became their sovereign.”
Investigative journalist Clara Vance has spent three years building an airtight case against the Costa syndicate. She has the photographs from the dock meeting. She has the handwritten source interviews in a lockbox under her apartment floor — analog, unwipeable, irrefutable. She has everything she needs to bring the Commission down. She just needs one more night.
That night ends in a rain-soaked alley with the syndicate’s executioner’s hand over her mouth and every backup she thought she had destroyed in the time it takes her to run a block.
Matteo Costa doesn’t explain himself. He doesn’t negotiate. He has operated for thirty years as a blunt instrument of controlled violence, and the static in his mind has never been this loud — and never been this quiet as when she is in front of him. He can’t silence her. He keeps her instead.
Clara doesn’t break. She catalogues — maps the suite’s dimensions from acoustics alone, files everything in a mind trained to find the evidence in every silence. When Silvio Marchetti’s forces take her and Matteo tears the Commission apart to get her back, Clara will have to choose between the story she came to tell and the keys to an empire she has been handed.
Alternating First Person (Clara & Matteo) • HEA
Throughout All Three Books
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R6 000,00
1 in stock
