Beautiful Beast

Twenty years before the story begins, nineteen-year-old Rafael is completing his final job for the Albanian Mafia—planting surveillance while his partner's bomb is set to detonate inside a mall jewelry store.

Twenty years before the story begins, nineteen-year-old Rafael is completing his final job for the Albanian Mafia—planting surveillance while his partner's bomb is set to detonate inside a mall jewelry store. The mall should be deserted, but a toddler breaks free from her parents and sprints toward the store's glittering crystal displays. Rafael doesn't think—he runs. He scoops the girl into his arms as the explosion tears through the building. Glass shrapnel shreds his face and hands as he shields her tiny body with his own. Through failing vision, he sees her dark eyes glaring up at him—not crying, just annoyed, as if he interrupted her playtime. The girl is unharmed. Rafael collapses. The scars he earns will define the rest of his life.

Vasilisa's last hack lands her on a plane to Sicily

Vasilisa Petrova, a twenty-three-year-old computer science graduate and daughter of Chicago's Bratva leader, has been hacking the world's top security companies for sport. Her favorite target is Delta Security, a global private firm, where she leaves mischievous traces—small donations to church choirs, reformatted bullet points into tiny stars. When two of Delta's goons snatch her off a Chicago sidewalk, she fights back with everything available: a backpack swung like a baseball bat, a knee to the groin, a deodorant can turned flamethrower, and a toothbrush aimed at an eye socket. None of it is enough. She wakes drugged on a private jet, is flown across the Atlantic, and deposited in a wine cellar on the Sicilian coast. Guido, the blond brother of whoever ordered her abduction, delivers the news: she's in Sicily now.

She slashes his arm with a wine bottle; he carries her to bed

Rafael De Santi enters his own wine cellar expecting a defiant man. Instead, he finds a tiny, filthy woman huddled in the corner clutching a smashed bottle. He crouches in the darkness—intentionally hiding his scarred face—and reaches toward her. She swipes jagged glass across his forearm, drawing blood. Even half-conscious from hunger and lingering sedation, she fights. When she faints, Rafael carries her upstairs to his own bedroom, bandages her raw wrists where handcuffs scraped skin, removes her shoes, and tucks her into his bed—a bed no one else has ever slept in. Guido runs facial recognition and identifies her as Roman Petrov's daughter, the Russian Bratva's princess. Rafael refuses to send her home. Then he goes outside, executes one goon with a bullet to the forehead, and punches his own brother's face bloody for standing by.