An Age Gap Forbidden Protector Dark Mafia Romance - The Vow He Broke For Her #979997

HE SWORE TO HER FATHER HE'D KEEP HER SAFE.
HE NEVER SWORE NOT TO WANT HER.
My father gave me a book the night he died.
He told me to keep it close. He told me to trust no one with it. He told me to wait — to actually wait — for a man who would come for me and say his real name out loud. Because the man I had called my uncle for twenty-four years had been lying to me about every one of them.
The man came. He was forty-seven. He was a thousand miles harder than my father ever let me believe the world could be. And he looked at me like I was something he had been carrying his whole adult life and never expected to have to set down on a desk in front of him.
He said he had made a vow to my father.
He didn't tell me it was already breaking.
✦ ✦ ✦
Twenty-three years ago Renato took a bullet meant for me, and on the floor of a Brooklyn bar with his blood between us he made me swear one thing. Keep the girl clean. Keep her out of this. Keep her from ever knowing what we are.
I have kept that vow with everything I am.
Then she walks into my study and sets her bag down so I cannot see that her hands are shaking. And I know with a clarity I have not felt since I buried my own wife and child that the daughter her father wanted hidden is the most dangerous thing in this city. Because she is the only person alive who can read what he left behind. Every man with a stake in our world is coming for her. The leak is inside my own house. And I am the last and worst thing standing between them.
I made her father a vow.
I am about to break it in every way a vow can be broken.
✦ ✦ ✦
There is a ledger no one in this city but her can read.
There is a name inside it someone has spent twelve years and a great deal of blood trying to bury.
There is an age gap of twenty-three years between the man sworn to keep her clean and the man who is starting to look at her like she is the only honest thing he has held in two decades — and that age gap is the smallest forbidden distance between them.
He has kept her in the dark her whole life.
He is about to stop keeping her.
And he is about to find out, in the worst possible way, the difference between keeping the woman you love — and choosing her.
✦ ✦ ✦
✓ Age gap (47 / 24) — and every bit of it earned
✓ His best friend's daughter
✓ Sworn protector turned devastating possessive don
✓ Forbidden, forced-proximity, one-locked-house, one-impossible-vow
✓ A heroine with a spine — and a quiet skill no one saw coming
✓ A traitor inside the house no one has thought to look at
✓ One coded ledger every powerful man in the city is willing to kill for
✓ Slow burn that earns every degree of the heat when it lands
✓ HEA — scarred, real, and absolutely worth it
✦ ✦ ✦
She thought she was hidden.
She thought she was safe.
She didn't know the most dangerous man in New York had been her keeper since she was a child.
Or that the night he stopped keeping her would be the night her real life began.
THE VOW HE BROKE FOR HER — a standalone full-length age-gap dark mafia romance from Greer Ashby, author of My Husband's Secret Texts to His First Love. Best read with the door locked, a glass of something dark on the table beside you, and tomorrow morning cleared. One-click and begin.