Vice

MILA

My father owed a dangerous man three million dollars.

He paid him with me.

One rainy night on a Brooklyn pier, I went from a senator's daughter with a cello and a future to collateral. A line in a stranger's ledger.

Azlan Zharkov never raises his voice. He doesn't have to. He keeps me in a glass tower forty-two floors above New York and makes me buy back everything I've lost, one piece at a time. My music. My clothes. My name.

Every privilege has a price. He sets it. I decide whether to pay.

I tell myself it's a game I can win. That I'm the one in control every time I say yes.

But the man who holds my debt has started looking at me like I'm the one thing he can't afford.

And I've started wanting him to.

AZLAN

She was never supposed to be a woman. She was supposed to be a key.

I took her for the one thing only she can give me. I didn't plan on wanting the rest.

She bites. She bargains. She stands in my house in a ruined dress and refuses to break on schedule.

I don't take what I can buy. So I make her name a price.

Then she stops asking me for anything, and I have no idea what to do with a woman who gives herself away for free.

Somebody in this city wants her dead. The man who sold her to me is only the beginning.

I'll burn New York to the ground before I let anyone take her back.

This is the first book in The Crowned in Vice Series. Reading order:

Vice.

Ruin.