Falling Behind

𝐀 𝐁𝐢𝐥𝐥𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐚𝐢𝐫𝐞 𝐌𝐚𝐟𝐢𝐚 𝐑𝐨𝐦𝐚𝐧𝐜𝐞 𝐦𝐞𝐞𝐭𝐬 𝐇𝐢𝐠𝐡-𝐅𝐚𝐬𝐡𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐃𝐫𝐚𝐦𝐚

"The city isn't too big for me, Jake. Your mind is just too small for the woman I became."

Marcellina "Celine" Barnes was supposed to be a tragic footnote. Left broken and feeling "left behind" in a messy Queens apartment by her toxic ex, she's spent years letting other people edit her self-worth. But when she accidentally stumbles into the cutthroat, hyper-edited world of Remus Magazine with nothing but a handful of rusted safety pins and a genius mind for style, she decides to rewrite her own script.

Enter Aristide "Aristo" Marchetti.

He is the magazine's towering, stone-cold billionaire CEO. To the public, he's an un-liable corporate monolith. To the underworld, he's a dangerous Sicilian mafia kingpin hiding behind a glass desk. Aristo has spent his entire life building an icy fortress to survive a brutal family war-until Celine blazes into his archive and completely dismantles his defenses.

He's a man of absolute control, except for one fatal, un-liable flaw: whenever Celine is near, his ears flush a burning, brilliant shade of crimson, betraying his deep, dangerous devotion.

Just when Celine finally conquers her past and claims her crown as Creative Director beside her fiercely protective alphahole, the elevator doors slide open. A cold, old-money shadow from Sicily steps into her sunlit office. She wears the matching ancient signet ring to Aristo's knuckle, carries a blood covenant signed by dead grandfathers, and has come to New York to claim her king.

Can a girl from Queens edit a centuries-old mafia legacy out of the script? Or will the high-stakes layout of the syndicate tear them apart?