Rourke
"What happens when the most feared man in Moscow discovers that his favorite weapon is no longer a gun, but the quiet boy who wears his name like a secret?"
............
It is a truth Sebastian Vale Azarov has long believed that power is best taken, not given. From the dirt of Moscow's streets to the top of its criminal world, he has cut and clawed his way up, trading mercy for survival until fear became the easiest language he spoke. When a rival family offers their daughter to settle a debt, it feels like background noise---another tidy reminder that the city still moves when he says so.
Instead, he gets Nathaniel Elias Ravelle.
Nathaniel is wrong for this world in all the ways that make Sebastian look twice. Too quiet where everything is loud, too calm where panic should live, and far too willing to meet Sebastian's eyes like he's a problem to solve instead of a monster to avoid.He doesn't fit the blood, the rules, the clean lines Sebastian has drawn around his life, and that should make him easy to send away.
It is, inconveniently, the opposite.
The more Sebastian tests him---small cruelties, sharp words, temptations placed exactly where Nathaniel will trip over them--the more Nathaniel proves stubbornly, quietly unbreakable. He flinches, but he doesn't run. He blushes, but he doesn't beg. Somewhere between too long glances and touches that shouldn't happen, the simple, brutal way Sebastian has always seen the world starts to tilt.
Outside, enemies are closing in and his empire is hungry for another sacrifice. Inside, in the narrow space between a threat and a kiss, Sebastian is left with a choice he never planned on having:- keep the cold, easy cruelty that has always kept him safe, or reach for the one man who looks at the devil and seems to think there is still something left to save.
Sebastian has never believed himself capable of goodness.
But wanting Nathaniel might be the first sin he commits without regret.