BENEATH THE SANGRE |

One reckless night in Athens was supposed to mean nothing.

For Rianna Davis - a retired American supermodel from South Central LA, with a ring on her finger and a future she finally believed in - it was exactly that: a mistake sealed away, a stranger forgotten. Until the stranger's last name turned everything she thought she knew into a lit fuse with no visible end.

Damon Drakos doesn't share. He doesn't ask. And when a secret pregnancy surfaces with only one possible explanation, he doesn't hesitate.

What begins as leverage slowly, dangerously becomes something neither of them has a name for. And then a wedding happens. And then it becomes something worse.

Set against Athens's collision of ancient beauty and modern ambition - rooftop bars above the Acropolis, candlelit museums, cliffside islands, the wind off the Aegean, and the quiet suffocating weight of dynasty money - Forbidden Secrets follows two people dismantling everything they touch on their way toward something that might, if they survive it, be real.

But there's Leonidas. Her husband. His brother. A good man who deserves none of this.

A family is holding its fractures together with silk and silence. A patriarch whose calculated quiet is its own form of damage. A detective with photographs. A brother who has finally decided that knowing and saying nothing are the same thing.

And there's a city that has outlasted empires - that has held every kind of desire and ruin in its marble and dust - and will keep this secret as long as you can afford to keep paying.

This is not a love story that happens cleanly. The marriage doesn't fix it. The second pregnancy doesn't make it any easier. Nothing about it is safe. Everything about it is slow.

© _RelleLebby_// R. L.