The Mafia's Queen

Maeve O’Brien doesn’t knock.

She kicks in doors, slices throats in alleyway snow, and walks out without a speck of blood on her silk blouse. As Captain of Boston’s only Irish clan, she keeps her people in line and her siblings wrapped in barbed wire protection. A flash of steel from her knives, a sudden, vicious rage—those are the only warnings anyone gets.

But the debts her father signed in whiskey and arrogance have come due.

The Board—the shadow investors who built the O’Brien empire—want their payment. Old decrees, inked before his death, demand Maeve hand over her own brothers and sisters as bargaining chips. Refuse, and she doesn’t just lose her throne; she signs the death warrants of everyone who still eats at her table.

That’s when the Reaper comes back to town.

Killian Linwood, the underworld’s favorite monster, moves like a rumor and kills like a prayer denied. The two black claw knives at his hips, the copper taste of violence he never quite washes from his mouth—those are the things people fear.

Maeve remembers other things: his hand over hers on a gun, the fight that tore them apart, the way he never once flinched from her fury.

Now assassins circle, and Killian plants himself at her side with a simple vow: he will keep her breathing and drag her soul back where he thinks it belongs—with him. To save her siblings, Maeve has to trust the man she once loved enough to ruin, and let his darkness bleed into hers.

Together, they’ll carve a path through every ghost her father left behind, or burn Boston’s underworld to the ground trying—and some of that fire will be their own.