We Were Supposed to Be Strangers

Angelina D'Amato was twenty-three and pregnant when Vincenzo went to prison. Twenty-three and terrified that the life he chose would swallow their daughter he didn't know about whole before she even took her first breath. So she had to make a choice. Walk away or watch everything burn.

She chose to walk away.

Seven years later, 1995 NYC, she's an undercover NYPD agent with a new face and a singular focus. She's to infiltrate the Castellano crime family and take down their Consigliere. The job is dangerous. The target is deadly. And when she sits across from Vincenzo Vitale for the first time as "Marianna Marino," she realizes the worst part isn't the risk of being killed.

It's that he still looks at her like she's the only person in the room.

Vincenzo Vitale spent seven years building an empire on the ashes of everything he lost. Prison taught him control. Power taught him patience. Being Consigliere taught him that sentiment gets you killed.

Angelina broke him, but he had moved on. He turned off his emotions and let the dark mafioso life consume his soul. There was no more room for heartbreak, and he'd learned to live in the dark until she became the light he didn't want.

When the blonde woman walked into his world, something about her unravels him in ways he can't explain. She's too smart for her own good. Too familiar in moments that shouldn't feel familiar at all. He tells himself it's attraction or chemistry and nothing more.

Until Vincenzo is hit with the realization that she is not some ordinary blonde, but the woman he used to love.

Love doesn't always give you a choice. Sometimes it just gives you a reckoning and the knowledge that some people were never meant to be strangers, no matter how hard you tried to make them disappear.