Taste of the Dark - A Mafia Romance
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I tried to quit.
My boss said no.
When you work for billionaire restaurateur Bastian Hale, every day is an exercise in endurance.
He screams at you in front of half the staff? Endure.
He tears your work to bits and tells you to start again? Endure.
He surprises you shirtless in the office late one night? Endure... then go home and die of embarrassment.
I've endured six years of Bastian Hale.
I can endure anything.
... Until my doctor tells me I'm going blind in ninety days.
Suddenly, enduring isn't the goal anymore.
Living is.
Seeing everything I can before the lights go out forever.
And that means one thing: quitting the job that's consumed my entire adult life.
There's just one problem:
Bastian doesn't accept my resignation.
Instead, he shreds my letter to pieces...
Offers me a million dollars to stay...
And vows to make my last ninety days of sight worth remembering.
The man is arrogant. Brutal. Cold as the walk-in freezer.
But his hands are warm.
And in the dark, he teaches me things my eyes never could.
I wanted one last look at the light.
I got a taste of the dark instead.
Taste of the Dark - A Mafia Romance Chapter 1
ELIANA
a·muse-bouche: /əˌmo͞ozˈbo͞oSH/: noun
1: a small item of food served as an appetizer or teaser before a meal.
2: an unexpected little taste that leaves you hungry for much, much more.
If I'm gonna have the worst day of my life, I would've appreciated at least a little heads-up. The universe should have the decency to warn you when bad shit is coming, you know? It wouldn't be hard. A little heads-up text from the cosmos. Maybe a fortune cookie that says, Buckle up, buttercup, because tomorrow's going to kick you right in the hoo-ha.
But no. Nothing.
Instead, I wake up at 5:45 A.M. to an alarm whose noise I hate with every fiber of my being. I swing my legs out of bed with my usual Monday morning enthusiasm (which is to say, none whatsoever) and promptly trip over my laptop charger. It sends me careening face-first into my dresser with a very unladylike grunt.
Things go downhill from there.
It's a gray day, wet and bitter and unforgiving the way only Chicago in February can be. A UPS truck splashes me with a cold puddle of street juice. My coffee shop is out of caramel syrup for my latte. I stub my toe on the staircase leading into my optometrist's office, and then when I get into my appointment, Dr. Haggerty tells me something I never, ever wanted to hear.
In ninety days or so, you're going to be blind.
Oh, yeah.
That.
That actually happened.
It's comical, isn't it? It's ludicrous-the adjective, not the rapper. It's straight-up outrageous for someone to be able to look you in the eyes and say that.
You have ninety days left to enjoy sunsets and pretty flowers and goofy Western movies.
You have ninety days left to memorize the faces of your loved ones and the happy smile of a stranger's baby on the L.
You have ninety days to gaze at everything you've ever cherished, before it all gets taken away from you by a genetic disease that you cannot stop and everything goes black forever.
But he did say that. Dr. Haggerty looked me right in my eyes, in the eyes that have been failing me little by little for a very long time and are soon to be failing me a whole lot more in a very short time, and he said, I'm sorry, Eliana, but there's nothing I can do.
I suggest you make the most of the time you have left.
Impossible.
Preposterous.
But real.
The rest of the day goes by in a surreal daze. I'm like a robot. An emotionless, unfeeling robot. So when Kyle, my least favorite coworker, sends a cryptically worded mass email implying that it's my fault that some requested documents were late, why should I care? When the elevator is down for maintenance and I have to walk up seventeen flights of stairs after my lunch break, why should I be bothered? When Kyle's industrial-political backstabbing means that I have to stay late to compile a report that he should've compiled weeks ago, why would it matter to me?
I didn't care.
I wasn't bothered.
It.
Does.
Not.
Matter.
Hell, I don't even have the energy to translate Screw you, Kyle into corporate-ese. As 5 P.M. strikes, I just sigh and watch everyone else file out of the office while I stay chained to my desk.
Now, with the sun long gone beneath the surface of Lake Michigan, I sit alone in the twentieth-floor offices of Hale Hospitality, bathed in the cold glow of my computer monitor.
My eyeballs hurt. That normally wouldn't feel like a five-alarm fire-after all, I've been nostrils-deep in a spreadsheet all day-but with this morning's bombshell, every single floater and blink is a disaster in the making. I can't help but panic.
Is this it? Is this when the lights go out?
I grit my teeth and send the report to the printer at the far end of the floor. Then, while I wait for it to print, I minimize the spreadsheet and open up a new tab.
Leber congenital amaurosis-that's what Dr. Haggerty called it. "It's extraordinarily rare for it to manifest this late," he said. "You're actually quite the medical anomaly."
Great. Just what every twenty-seven-year-old wants to hear. Hey, at least I am special.
The office is tomb-quiet. Everyone else, all those happy normies, have gone home to their normal lives with their normal problems and their normally functioning retinas.
Twenty floors below me, downtown Chicago goes about its Thursday night business. But up here, it is just me, the hum of the HVAC system, and the weight of my impending doom.
I push back from my desk. Kyle's stupid report can wait. Googling the gruesome particularities of my future can wait. It can all wait, can't it? In the grand scheme of things, does any of this matter?
Standing up, I close my eyes.
The darkness is immediate and absolute. My heart rate kicks up a notch, but I force myself to keep them shut. If this is going to be my reality in T-minus ninety days, I might as well start practicing now.
Baby steps first. I know this office like the back of my hand-or at least, I think I do. Three steps forward ought to put me at the edge of my cubicle. I shuffle forward, hands extended like a zombie in a B-movie, and immediately bang my hip on the corner of my desk.
"Okay, correction: two steps forward, not three."
The sound of my scared, nasally voice makes me cringe. I am talking to myself in an empty office while playing blind woman's bluff.
If this isn't rock bottom, it's at least basement-adjacent.
I try again. This time, I successfully navigate out of my cubicle and into the main hallway. My bruised hip is very grateful.
Ten steps to the break room. I count them out, running my fingers along the wall for guidance. The texture changes from painted drywall to the smooth surface of the glass partition-
"Shit!"
I accidentally kick a waiting bench outside a VP's office, in the exact same spot I stubbed my toe at Dr. Haggerty's this morning. The pain makes me want to quit. It'd be so nice to just assume the fetal position on the ground and cry 'til the cows come home.
But I do not quit, or cry, or tuck my head between my legs like a frightened little baby.
I keep going.
Because that's what Eliana Hunter does. She keeps going-when her dad abandons the family, when she has to work three jobs to put herself through community college, when everyone says she'll never make it past reception at a cutthroat company like Hale Hospitality with a cutthroat boss like Bastian Hale.
And she keeps going now...
... even if she can't see where she's headed.
The break room is easier. I know where the coffee maker is by smell alone (mostly because nobody ever cleans it properly). I successfully avoid both the refrigerator and the microwave that someone has definitely used to reheat fish again, despite my endless guerrilla campaign of passive-aggressive sticky notes.
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Taste of the Dark - A Mafia Romance of Contents
Chapter 1 Ch. 1Chapter 2 Ch. 2Chapter 3 Ch. 3Chapter 4 Ch. 4Chapter 5 Ch. 5Chapter 6 Ch. 6
Chapter 7 Ch. 7
Chapter 8 Ch. 8
Chapter 9 Ch. 9
Chapter 10 Ch. 10
Chapter 11 Ch. 11
All Chapters all
New Release Novels
9.1
Waking up with a cold, scaly hand wrapped around my throat wasn't the worst part.
The worst part was realizing I'd transmigrated into the body of Terra Mason—the most despised woman in the entire Enclave. She drugged high-level beast-men and forced them into life-binding bio-contracts. She locked an aquatic warrior in a dry basement until his organs failed. She treated the most lethal males in the city like broken toys.
Zev, the Level 6 serpent who's currently choking me, would rather blow up his own heart than spend another day as my slave. His affection metric? Negative ninety. His trust? Zero.
Then my system activates: the Kore AI. It gives me exactly 500 credits, a medical nano-gel, and a recipe for neutralizing the radioactive poison in mutant meat. Real food. In this world, that's worth more than gold.
I save Rhys, the dying aquatic male everyone left for dead. I season a slab of purple mutant steak until Sam, a battle-scarred grizzly shifter, groans at the taste—and his trust points finally tick above zero. When my backstabbing ex-best friend tries to steal my males and destroy me, I don't scream or throw a tantrum like the old Terra. I dismantle her with the truth.
But earning their trust means more than grilling meat. A scorpion swarm ambushes us at midnight. Sam throws himself between me and a stinger the size of my arm. As he stands over the corpse, fur receding from his claws, he stares at me and whispers, "You were testing me."
Yes. I was. Because in this world, the weak don't survive. And I refuse to be weak again.
Four beast-men. Four contracts. One system. And a whole lot of steak. Let this dystopian wasteland know—I'm not the monster they remember. I'm worse. I'm the one who's going to feed them until they'd kill for me.
8.3
I was the long-lost Donovan heiress, finally brought home after a childhood in foster care. My parents adored me, my husband cherished me, and the woman who tried to ruin my life, Kiera Reese, was locked away in a mental facility. I was safe. I was loved.
On my birthday, I decided to surprise my husband, Ivan, at his office. But he wasn't there.
I found him at a private art gallery across town. He was with Kiera.
She wasn't in a facility. She was radiant, laughing as she stood beside my husband and their five-year-old son. I watched through the glass as Ivan kissed her, a familiar, loving gesture he’d used with me just that morning.
I crept closer and overheard them. My birthday wish to go to the amusement park had been denied because he’d already promised the entire park to their son—whose birthday was the same day as mine.
"She’s so grateful to have a family, she’d believe anything we tell her," Ivan said, his voice laced with a cruelty that stole my breath. "It's almost sad."
My entire reality—my loving parents who funded this secret life, my devoted husband—was a five-year lie. I was just the fool they kept on stage.
My phone buzzed. It was a text from Ivan, sent while he stood with his real family.
"Just got out of the meeting. So exhausting. I miss you."
The casual lie was the final blow. They thought I was a pathetic, grateful orphan they could control.
They were about to find out just how wrong they were.
7.5
To save my family's dying company, I was forced to marry a billionaire I hadn't seen in fourteen years.
But right outside the City Clerk's office, he tossed our marriage certificate at me like a cheap receipt and shoved a four-year-old boy into my arms.
"Your new life has begun. You're on babysitting duty now."
He sneered and left me stranded on the sidewalk. I realized with absolute horror that my new husband was Ellsworth Marshall, the sickly boy I had relentlessly bullied in middle school.
He didn't spend five billion dollars to save the Bradford family. He bought me to execute a slow, suffocating revenge.
He used his orphaned nephew as a pawn, explicitly threatening my father that if I failed to play the perfect, compliant nanny, he would instantly destroy our family's legacy.
He even had his guards lock me out of his Long Island estate on my first night, forcing me to stand in the cold dark just to prove he owned me.
I was trapped in a gilded cage, suffocated by the guilt of my past and the terror of my present.
Why did he involve an innocent child in his twisted vendetta? How much humiliation was enough to pay for my childhood cruelty?
Looking at the terrified little boy clinging to my skirt, I tightened my grip on my suitcase.
If he wanted to destroy my will piece by piece, I had to find a way to survive the monster I created.
8.8
Clara supported her boyfriend Leo for four years, paying his rent and buying his headshots while working dead-end extra gigs.
On his twenty-sixth birthday, she caught him in their bed with Veronica, a wealthy producer's daughter who constantly stole Clara's roles.
Leo mocked Clara as a "pathetic, poor stepping stone" who was just there until he got his foot in the door.
Veronica threatened to ruin Clara's career forever.
Clara dumped him, packed her bags, and impulsively entered a contract marriage with a cold stranger she met at City Hall.
But her nightmare wasn't over.
When her mother suddenly needed a $200,000 emergency brain surgery, Clara was forced to take a demeaning extra gig to survive.
There, Veronica and her starlet friend cornered Clara.
They mocked her cheap clothes, ridiculed her new wedding ring as fake glass, and intentionally poured scalding coffee on her feet.
"Well, maid, you better clean that up."
Veronica laughed, forcing Clara to her knees to wipe up the burning liquid while snapping photos.
Clara swallowed her burning humiliation, secretly recording their abuse on her phone.
She endured the pain, desperate for the $300 day rate to save her mother's life, feeling entirely crushed by their overwhelming wealth and power.
What she didn't know was that outside the soundstage, her new contract husband—the man she thought was just a struggling, broke tech worker—was sitting in a sleek black Maybach.
He watched his wife kneeling on the floor, and his dark eyes filled with a lethal, terrifying rage.
7.8
For five years, I was the flawless wife to the heir of the De Luca empire, securing billion-dollar acquisitions to prove my worth.
But my husband, Alessandro, still paraded his mistress in our home, publicly humiliating me as a "cold spreadsheet" while she sneered in triumph.
It didn't stop at infidelity. When I dared to cut off her credit cards, Alessandro decided to teach me a lesson.
He allowed his mistress to secretly file down the metal clasp on my horse's saddle right before a massive public equestrian event.
My leg was completely shattered in a horrific, agonizing fall in front of hundreds of elite guests.
While I lay bleeding in the dirt, my husband didn't even glance my way. Instead, he rushed to hold his mistress, shielding her eyes from the gruesome sight.
Later, pretending to be unconscious in the infirmary, I overheard him ordering his guards.
"Get rid of the saddle. It was just a lesson to remind her who's in charge."
He didn't just want me humiliated; he wanted me crippled and broken.
As the sterile smell of the hospital hit me, a horrifying realization set in—I was two weeks late. I was pregnant with his child.
The thought of my baby growing up in this ruthless, toxic family made my blood run cold, and the last spark of my love turned into absolute hatred.
The obedient wife died on that dirt track.
I quietly contacted his family's biggest rival and activated my secret scorched-earth protocol. It was time to burn his empire to the ground.
9.2
Celestia woke up heavily sedated, her wrists bound tightly to the legs of a grand piano in a cold, opulent room.
Before she could even process the panic, a towering billionaire named Sterling Sinclair IV stepped in, looking at her like a possessed piece of art.
The head maid then handed Celestia a thick surrogacy contract with her perfectly forged signature.
"You are here to bear an heir for Mr. Sinclair," the maid stated flatly.
Celestia screamed that they had the wrong person, but her desperate cries bounced uselessly off the soundproof walls.
Stripped of her clothes, phone, and identity, she was trapped on an isolated island surrounded by high-voltage electric fences and armed guards.
When she furiously fought back, Sterling physically overpowered her, punishing her resistance with brutal, terrifying dominance until she lost consciousness on the marble floor.
She didn't understand who had kidnapped her from her normal life.
Why was her biometric data perfectly faked in a classified dossier?
Who had framed her as a willing, ten-million-dollar premium product for a ruthless billionaire?
Driven by pure survival, Celestia began aggressively consuming raw garlic and bathing in harsh white vinegar to destroy her fertility and repel his touch.
And when Sterling finally reviewed her bizarre, self-sabotaging dietary logs, the terrifying truth hit his calculating mind like a physical blow.
The broken, innocent woman he had been brutally tormenting all week was never his hired surrogate.
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