_RelleLebby_
Her father built an empire on silence and steel. When they killed him, they expected her to grieve quietly and disappear.
They miscalculated.
Corren Vale does not mourn in public. She does not collapse in private. She identifies every person who smiled at her father's funeral while holding the knife that put him in the ground, and she begins, methodically, to remove them.
Chicago does not belong to the grieving. It belongs to whoever is willing to do what no one else will stomach. Corren has always known that. She just never thought she would have to prove it this publicly, or this permanently.
Nico DeLuca is not an ally. He is not a partner. He is a problem she cannot solve without creating a worse one. Son of a Mafia captain, raised between old money and street violence, he operates on instinct and appetite. He has never once been told no by anyone who survived the conversation.
He believes she is a liability dressed in a nice coat.
She believes he will burn everything she is trying to build.
They are both right.
The city is watching. The bodies are accumulating. And somewhere beneath the war, beneath the posturing and the gunfire and the rooms that smell like iron and expensive cologne, something is developing between them that neither of them has a name for and both of them recognize as catastrophic.
No Mercy Avenue is a mature dark romance set in the criminal underground of Chicago: violence, power, obsession, and the cost of inheriting a throne built on blood.
©️ RelleLebby // R. L.