Alex Riley – författare

She was payment for a debt she never owed. He had been watching her for four years.When Mara Voss is informed that her father's catastrophic debt to the Sorin crime syndicate will be settled in the oldest currency available — a marriage she did not choose — she does what she has always done: she reads the room, negotiates the terms, and walks in with her head up.What she does not account for is Kael Dravec.Sorin's enforcer is not a man who announces himself. He is cold architecture and careful silence, a face that gives back only what it chooses to, and a reputation in Velden's criminal underworld that is spoken of in the specific tone people reserve for facts they would prefer were otherwise. He is also, Mara will discover, the reason she was chosen. Not by Sorin. By Kael himself — who requested her, specifically, from the night four years ago when she walked into a room she had no business being in and read it in forty-five seconds flat.Now they are bound by contract, sharing an apartment thirty-one floors above a city that runs on favors and fear, building something neither of them planned for: a partnership that begins as performance and becomes, in the way of all true things, entirely real. And beneath the careful domestic peace of their new life, something else is building too — the slow, methodical dismantling of the man who engineered the debt in the first place.Sorin wanted a consolidation. He is about to discover what he actually created.Vows of Blood and Bone is a slow-burn dark romance set in the atmospheric criminal underworld of fictional Central European city Velden. It features an arranged marriage between a sharp, self-possessed heroine and a deeply obsessive, protective hero, with all the electric tension of two people who are, from the very beginning, exactly matched.