Bound by Betrayal

Talia Costa has exactly one rule about Marchetti men: don’t.She breaks it in the space of a single terrace kiss.Dario Marchetti has spent a decade making himself impossible to lose anything to - no attachments, no risk, nothing worth losing sleep over. Then Talia Costa walks into his orbit with a sharp mouth and sharper wit, and every careful principle he’s built his life around goes up in flames.What starts as stolen hours and borrowed cars becomes something neither of them can keep hidden forever - not with a Costa patriarch who trusts no Marchetti soldier near his family, not with a rival suitor circling the moment he senses a rejection, and not once an unplanned pregnancy forces the truth into the open on someone else’s timeline instead of their own.Dario has one fatal habit: when the pressure’s highest, he reaches for strategy instead of her. Talia has one unbreakable rule: she won’t be managed like a problem to solve. When his old pattern costs them everything in the one room that mattered most, there’s no clever apology that fixes it - only the long, unglamorous work of actually becoming a different man, one ordinary day at a time.Bound by Betrayal is a dark, slow-burn secret-relationship romance with real jealousy on both sides, forced proximity, a hero who fails before he earns it, and a possessive, hard-won HEA. Book two of The Marchetti Vendetta.