Haunted Bratva Daddy

He has one rule. It has kept him alive for twenty years.

Never let anyone close enough to bury.

Grisha has run security for the Sorokin family since he was young enough to think loyalty could fill every empty room in a man. He has been shot, stabbed, and broken in ways that never show on the outside, and for eight years he has been a widower who trusts nothing more than the wall he built around what's left of his heart.

Then an art appraiser walks into his restricted gallery wing with a loupe, a sharp mouth, and a habit of finding exactly what she was never supposed to find.

Natasha Volkov isn't here for him. She's here to catalogue a private collection and quietly chase the truth her grandfather left behind: a locked notebook, a name called the Keeper, and a debt in faded ink that was never hers to inherit. She is not here to notice how carefully he watches a room, or how much safer she feels standing in it because of him.

But her grandfather's secrets and his dead wife's murder lead back to the same man, and that man is standing in the Sorokin ballroom in a tailored suit, smiling for the cameras. Now she knows too much to walk away clean. Now Grisha has to choose between the wall that has kept him breathing and the woman already living on the other side of it.

He built that wall to survive losing someone once.

He never planned on losing this fight to a woman who refuses to stay on the safe side of it.