HELD

Wren Kovacs runs the house on Merrick Road the way she’s run it for seven years: three rules, one letter in the ledger, and never a name. It’s how a woman with nothing left to lose keeps a mafia safe house — and herself — alive.

Sabin Vukovic breaks the first rule before he’s through the door. He knows her name. He knows her rules well enough to say them along with her. And he has twenty-one days, the maximum any guest is allowed to stay, to get the one thing she’s protected for four years: the real name behind a single letter in her book.

He doesn’t lie. He doesn’t chase. He doesn’t need to force anything. He just stays — takes her chair by the window, fixes what’s been broken for years, notices what nobody has ever bothered to notice about her — and waits, patient and terrifyingly certain, to see what she’ll give him without being asked.

She knows exactly what he is. She’s fed and housed men like him for seven years. She should be immune.

She isn’t.

As his twenty-one days run out, the choice in front of Wren stops being about protecting a name in a book. It becomes about who she’s willing to become to keep the first person who has ever truly seen her — and what she’s prepared to do for him when the clock finally hits zero.

HELD is Book 1 of THE TWELVE HOUSES: a dark mafia forced-proximity romance with a fully earned happy ending, a hero who never gets safe, and a heroine who stops being invisible on her own terms.