SETTLED

Katarina Vuković follows money until every hidden obligation has a name.

Her newest audit uncovers the Founding Settlement, a decades-old Bellandi-Vuković marriage bargain still buried beneath property, trusts, political appointments, and businesses across Chicago. The marriage authority is dead. The money it moved is not.

Lorenzo Bellandi has spent his life making people choose the Bellandi answer without ever taking the choice away. He can open doors, rescue contracts, move lenders, and make refusal ruinously expensive. He is also the man fighting to contain Katarina’s audit.

Then each discovers evidence that could destroy the other.

Mutual blackmail forces cooperation. Rival houses make neutrality impossible. And when no single family can control the disputed assets without poisoning the result, Katarina proposes the one structure dangerous enough to hold them both accountable: a marriage of convenience requiring both their signatures.

The marriage is supposed to be a temporary instrument. Instead, every shared decision turns more personal. Every favor Lorenzo gives hits the one wound Katarina has spent her adult life protecting. Every time she uses his power without repaying it, she crosses a line she once believed kept her independent.

And the most dangerous change is not what Lorenzo can make her do.

It is what Katarina learns she is willing to author herself.

SETTLED is Book Five of THE BRIDE PRICE, an interconnected dark mafia romance series with a complete couple arc, open-door consensual heat, and two enemies who become most dangerous when they start choosing the same side.