My father said the Marchettis built everything out of heat and force, and then they owned you. He meant it as a warning. He never lived to learn that a warning, in this city, is just a recipe — and that his honest daughter had been paying attention.

Empire of Ashes is a serialized dark mafia romance audiobook, written by Mia. New episodes daily.

My father used to say that there are only ever two moves on the board — you can give them what they want, or you can become something they want more — and that the whole art of staying alive in this city was knowing which game you were in before you opened your mouth. I had eleven days, two families who wanted a dead man's ledger, and a husband I'd decided to keep alive, and so I did the thing my father had trained me for since before I understood I was being trained.

Empire of Ashes is a serialized dark mafia romance audiobook, written by Mia. New episodes daily.

There is a particular exhaustion to living in a house where one man wants to kill you for what you know and another is falling in love with you for what he doesn't, and I wore it, that week, like a second dress under the first.

Empire of Ashes is a serialized dark mafia romance audiobook, written by Mia. New episodes daily.

Tomas Vela died with a name on his lips, and the name was not the one I had built three months of hatred around, and I knelt on the floor of my father's old harbor office holding a dead man's hand and felt the entire architecture of my revenge come down around me like a building with its keystone pulled.

Empire of Ashes is a serialized dark mafia romance audiobook, written by Mia. New episodes daily.

The Marchettis kept a box at the opera, and on my eleventh night as a married woman I learned what the box was really for, which was not music.

Empire of Ashes is a serialized dark mafia romance audiobook, written by Mia. New episodes daily.

A marriage, I learned in my first week, is mostly a matter of breakfasts. You can learn more about a man across a breakfast table than across a bed, because at breakfast no one is performing; they are only tired, and hungry, and briefly, accidentally, themselves.

Empire of Ashes is a serialized dark mafia romance audiobook, written by Mia. New episodes daily.

They dressed me like a queen for a wedding that was really a transfer of property, and I let them, because a woman learns early that the costume you are put in tells you exactly what role you are expected to play — and the moment you understand the role, you can decide how to ruin it.

Empire of Ashes is a serialized dark mafia romance audiobook, written by Mia. New episodes daily.

They came to collect on the morning we buried my father, which tells you everything you need to know about the Marchetti family and the kind of mercy they keep.

Empire of Ashes is a serialized dark mafia romance audiobook, written by Mia. New episodes daily.