Broken Oath

CESARE

The man who killed my father sent me home with a lie.

He stood in his hall at dawn and told me I'd never been anything to him. A way in. A job. A pretty face he'd used and was done with.

Now his people owe my family a life, and he's walked across the border in the snow to pay it with his own.

My brother has put him in the stone rooms under our house in Venice, to wait for the night he dies. And he's handed me the key.

Every family in the city is watching to see what the Russian's whore does with the Russian's life.

He swears he never wanted me. I have until the last night of Carnival to make him a liar.

ZAKHAR

I came to Venice to die. I didn't come to be tempted.

The debt is mine, and I'll pay it. When they take me out on the black water, I won't make a sound.

But they've made him my keeper. The boy I lied to. The boy I sent away hating me, because hate was the only thing that would keep him alive in his father's house.

Now he comes down the stairs to my cell with a razor and a bottle and that mouth, and he wants the truth.

If I tell him I love him, he dies.

So I hold the wall. Whatever he does to me, I won't break.

This is the second book in The Winter Oath Series. Reading order:

Secret Oath.

Broken Oath.

Sacred Oath.

306 pages. Kindle edition.