Jamie Cordisco

Shame. Prejudice. Fear. All woven into the very fabric of my being. I'm swathed in them like the most suffocating cloak. Beneath this toxic mantle, I wear my desires close to my heart. Where it's dark. Where they're safe. Until I meet Darcy, a dancer at Alchemy and the most beautiful woman I've ever seen. The only problem? Her boyfriend, Max. She makes me feel alive, but he arouses emotions I've taken great care my entire life to condemn and deny and bury. Emotions I've always been taught are sinful and wrong.

Notorious Mafia enforcer and right hand of the Cosa Nostra, Maximo DiMarco has always looked out for me. He’s my protector. My brothers’ best friend. My crush—with the body of a god and the mind of a devil. And I am just a spoiled Mafia princess. At least that’s who most people think I am. They don’t look at me long enough to see the real me. But he sees....

According to the FBI, I was considered a serial murderer after three kills. What do they call me after fifty-two? They call me the Silencer. One final bullet would have been all it took to stop me from taking another soul, and I would have been doing Meridian City a service by pulling that trigger. An angel crying for help stopped me, and that night, I took three lives for her. Then three turned into eight. Then eight turned into twenty. Twenty turned into twenty-one. Twenty-one turned into twenty-three.

When you've been told your whole life that something is sinful, you have two options. Avoid it like the plague, like it has the power to destroy all that is good and pure. Or become as fixated upon it as Eve was upon that apple. I'm sick of the push-pull of terror and temptation. It's tearing me apart. I just want a bite of the apple. More than a bite. I want to devour it. Have its juices spill from my lips. And by apple, I, of course, mean sex.

Life shattered my childhood dreams—no white picket fences, no dream job, and definitely no flawless husband...Well, that last part isn't entirely true. I just didn't expect my husband's three friends to be my soulmates and lovers too, one of whom fathered the life growing inside me. It all began with rivers of blood, and it ends the same. Drop by drop, we'll exorcise our demons, but I fear we'll lose too much along the way.