Where Roses Bleed

ADELINA

My father sat down in my uncle's back room on a Thursday night owing four million dollars he did not have.

He offered them the house. He offered them the restaurant. He offered them my sister.

Then he offered them my little brother, who is nine.

And the man at the end of the table said my name instead.

Eight days later I married Salvatore Marchetti in a chapel with four people in it, in a dress a stranger paid for, and moved into a house that everybody in New York calls the Devil's Garden.

I know what he is. Everybody knows what he is.

What nobody told me is that he does not shout, he does not take, and he does not lie, and that he would rather stand in a doorway for four seconds than put one hand on me I had not asked for.

I was sold to him on a Thursday.

By the third week I was walking down that corridor on my own.

SALVATORE

I have never wanted anything.

That is not a boast. It is the entire reason I am still alive. You cannot take anything off a man who has nothing on the other side of the wall, and I have spent eighteen years making certain there was nothing out there at all.

Then I sat down in a restaurant in Bensonhurst on the worst night of my life, and a girl in an apron put a plate in front of me that I had not ordered.

She was seventeen. She did not know my name.

I have sent her one rose a year ever since, and I have never signed a single one of them.

Now she is in my house, at my table, in my mother's garden.

Her father is going to cost her everything, and there are five men in this city who decide what happens next, and every single one of them now knows she exists.

They can have my hands. They can have the rest of my life.

They are not having her.

This is the first book in The Devil's Garden Series. Reading order:

Where Roses Bleed.

Where Lilies Die.

Where Orchids Burn.

344 pages. Kindle edition.