The Mafia King's Heiress

Mara Strand sells ferry tickets in a gray harbor town and counts every dollar twice.

Her mother kept one rule all her life: never ask about your father. When her mother dies, Mara finds a heavy gold ring in a coffee tin, an old photograph and a name. It is the name of the most feared man on the Eastern shore.

Aurelio Corvino, the Mafia King, is dying with no son to take his seat. The night Mara reads his name, a black car is already waiting at the end of the pier, and the man beside it does not smile. Elio Verrano is the king's right hand and the coldest man she has ever met. He gives her a choice, not an order. She can go home with him and be named the heir, or stay in her booth and wait for the men who already know who she is.

Mara chooses the king's table. She arrives as a stranger in a borrowed dress, and every family at it wants her gone. The king's nephew wants the crown. The old captains want a man. And Elio, who has promised the dying king to keep her alive, is the one person she cannot afford to trust and cannot stop watching.

To hold the throne, Mara must marry into it, and the only man the families will accept is the one who never wanted her. But somewhere in the king's own house lies the truth about why her mother ran, and who made sure she never came back.

A paper marriage. A real heir. A throne with a knife under every cushion.