Dante

Twenty-four-year-old Dante watches his older brother Lorenzo defy their father, Salvatore Moretti — unchallenged head of the Chicago Cosa Nostra for three decades.

Twenty-four-year-old Dante watches his older brother Lorenzo defy their father, Salvatore Moretti — unchallenged head of the Chicago Cosa Nostra for three decades. Salvatore had groomed Lorenzo since birth to inherit the empire, but imposed a condition: marry Nicole Santangelo to seal a family alliance. Lorenzo refuses. He has fallen hopelessly in love with a Russian woman named Anya and will not surrender her, not even for the throne he bled for. In a single, cigar-smoke-filled exchange, Salvatore strips Lorenzo of his legacy and turns to his younger son. Dante inherits both the crown he never wanted and the bride his brother rejected. He closes his eyes, knowing the course of all their lives is about to change forever.

A quarter-million dollar debt costs Kat her freedom

Six years later, Kat Evanson comes home from her cleaning job to find two men in tailored suits sitting at her kitchen table. She hurls a baseball bat at one and tries to shoot the other with her own Glock — they've already emptied it. The man with the velvet voice catches her. He is Dante Moretti, head of the Cosa Nostra. Her brother Leo cheated his way to a quarter of a million dollars at one of Dante's poker games and vanished. Kat has no money and no idea where Leo went. So Dante takes the only asset Leo left behind: her. Within the hour, she's in the back of his Porsche, heading to a fortress of a mansion, with nothing but a small suitcase and the certainty that no one will notice she's gone.

Kat's nursing hands earn her a place in Dante's world

For the first five days, captivity looks like boredom. Kat wanders the west wing, watches TV, eats Sophia the housekeeper's cooking, and endures shirtless breakfasts across from Dante fresh from his gym. Then one of his men — a whiny cousin named Lenny — stumbles in with a knife wound. Kat stitches him up with the calm expertise of a former ER nurse, and something in her rekindles: purpose. She'd abandoned nursing two years ago after something terrible happened to her. When Lenny later slides his hand toward Kat's waist in the kitchen, Dante chokes him and cuts off two of his fingers with garden shears. Nobody is to touch what belongs to him. The message reaches his men — and, unwillingly, Kat herself.