SASKYA NOCTAROVA
I almost died in New York.
A knife in my side. Blood on silk. My husband’s name on my tongue before the dark swallowed me whole.
When I wake, Salvatore Spadaro is still there.
Sleepless. Furious. Terrifyingly gentle in all the ways he never promised to be.
I should be thinking about the attack. About Arseny’s betrayal. About the bounty still hanging over my head and the enemies still circling my name like wolves tasting blood in the air.
Instead, my father walks into my hospital room with divorce papers.
Mikhail Dragunov calls it protection.
I call it control.
He put me in this marriage when Sicily was useful. Now he wants to take it back because the daughter he raised as a weapon finally chose where to aim herself.
But I am not a contract he gets to rewrite.
Not anymore.
Salvatore is no longer just the man I was forced to marry. He is the hand I reach for when my body gives out. The voice that brings me back when panic tears through my chest. The man who carries me out of New York because I ask him to take me home.
Home.
Sicily.
His name on my finger. His family around me. His bed waiting beneath the same roof where I stopped feeling like a prisoner and started feeling like I belonged.
But choosing Dom means turning against the man who made me.
And when my brothers uncover the truth about Viktor, Arseny, Spain, and the rot inside our own bloodline, I finally understand the worst betrayal was never outside our family.
It was sitting at the head of the table.
SALVATORE SPADARO
I watched Mikhail Dragunov put his hands on my wife.
In front of my family. In front of his sons. In front of men who knew exactly how close that room came to bloodshed.
He came with divorce papers and called it protection, as if Saskya were still a daughter to be moved, traded, signed away, and returned when the arrangement stopped serving him.
He forgot one thing.
Saskya chose.
Not quietly. Not politely. Not safely.
She stood there stitched together, exhausted, shaking from pain, and still chose Sicily. Chose my name. Chose the life everyone else kept trying to decide for her.
Then her body gave out in my arms.
That is the part I cannot forgive.
Not the insult. Not the papers. Not even the threat.
The way she held herself upright until there was nothing left, because too many people in her life taught her that collapsing was weakness.
Now I am taking her home.
Not to hide her. Not to soften her. Not to turn her into something easier to love.
To let her breathe inside a house where no one gets to mistake obedience for devotion.
But Sicily is no safe zone.
Viktor’s trail leads deeper into Spain. Arseny’s betrayal opens doors no one wanted unlocked. A hidden operations room in Monreale exposes transfer logs, masked Russian messages, and one brutal truth: someone powerful has been moving pieces behind both families for years.
Saskya is wounded, furious, and closer than ever to the truth.
And I am no longer standing beside her because of an alliance.
I am standing there because her pain has become mine, her enemies have become mine, and the life waiting in Sicily is the only future I have no intention of surrendering.
This is the fourth book in The Sacred Code Series. Reading order: Omerta, Vendetta, Onore, Sangue.
