Bound by the Underboss

Lev Cassin has thirty days. Thirty days before his suppressor subsidy lapses, his protection disappears, and the Naples Omega Registry processes him through to the next arrangement without asking what he wants. He has forty-two credits, one bag he can pack in under two minutes, and a plan. He has always had a plan.What he does not have is a choice when a city official knocks on his door at seven in the morning with a bonded paper document and a name he does not recognize. Nicolo Sarra. Mafia underboss. Contracting Alpha.Effective immediately.Nico Sarra does not do things without a reason. He does not file a Designation Contract on a stranger out of mercy or impulse or coincidence. He has been watching Lev Cassin for fourteen months, mapping his mornings, learning his coffee brand, keeping an apartment ready on the Posillipo hill for a future he told himself he was not planning. He was planning it.The contract is legal. The apartment is stocked. The wardrobe is filled with clothes in Lev's exact size, ordered before the ink was dry. And the suppressor patches in the medical cabinet are not quite what they appear to be. Lev is not naive. He reads every document completely. He maps every exit. He counts every clause and catalogs every inconsistency and he knows, within three weeks, that the man who filed this contract is not the man who sits across from him in the kitchen turning his cup a quarter turn and answering every question he is actually asked. Both of those things are true at the same time.That is the problem.Because Nico Sarra has done something unforgivable and something real in the same gesture. He has built a gilded cage around a man he wanted and stocked it with every small true thing he knew about him. He has been thorough about the wrong things and the right ones simultaneously, and Lev, who has survived seven years by needing nothing from nobody, is finding out what happens when the need arrives anyway. In Naples, 2087, the Registry owns your biology. The organization owns your Alpha. The Designation Contract owns your year.Nothing owns what Lev decides.And Lev is still deciding. Content includes: non-consensual contract filing, deliberate biological coercion, explicit heat and knotting, organized crime, significant power imbalance, dark dubcon elements, and an HEA that was earned chapter by chapter and does not arrive easily. For readers who like their romance dark, their Omegas intelligent, and their endings hard-won. The Underboss Series, Book 1.HEA guaranteed.