Page 1 of The Mafia Bloodline
Prologue
Blood had already been spilled.
Roman Dragic had claimed his mate first…Layla, the human who’d walked into Nightshade and upended the world of predators and shadows. Their love had been forged in war, with demons clawing at the borders of their territory and the Irish mafia trying to carve out a piece of the empire. Roman had shown the world what it meant for a predator to be mated, ruthless, untouchable, and unyielding. With Layla at his side, he wasn’t just the leader of the Blood Mafia, he was a man reborn. Together, they brought Aleksander into the world, a son who carried both Roman’s ferocity and Layla’s light. The child was more than blood and bone; he was a symbol of survival, of love carved out of fire.
Then Lucien followed. The strategist. Cold, meticulous, and dangerous. He had found Sorcha chained in an Irish stronghold, broken but not bowed. Her rescue had ignited another war, pulling them deeper into the darkness with the demons and their human allies. Lucien had unleashed hell on those who dared touch her, and in the process discovered the one truth none of the Dragic brothers could escape: once a mate was claimed, there was no turning back. Sorcha’s bond with him had been as violent as it was tender, and in the end, it gave him something he had never believed he’d deserve…family. Their daughter, Sophia, was born under the watchful eyes of both the Dragic brothers and their enemies, a living promise that even in the darkest corners of the world, something pure could thrive.
Together, Roman and Lucien had proven that their kind could claim love, could build something enduring even as enemies circled closer and wars raged. But the fight was far from over. Demons still prowled, alliances still shifted, and new dangers stirred in the shadows.
And now, it was Volken’s turn.
The brother cloaked in silence and strategy, the one whose icy control had never cracked, not even in the bloodiest of wars. Volken Dragic had always been the watchful blade in the dark, the one who kept his brothers sharp, who never allowed himself weakness, never allowed himself love. But fate wasn’t finished with the Dragic family. Not yet.
Because when Volken’s eyes fell on Runa…a clumsy, honey-haired woman who had no business being in his world, something inside him snapped. And for the first time in his long, brutal life, the predator would be forced to face the one battle he could never prepare for.
The one he couldn’t win with strategy.
The war of the heart.
Two years had passed since Sorcha bore Lucien’s daughter, and in that time the Dragic brothers had done what they always did, they had expanded their empire, bleed their enemies dry, and bury the demons one nest at a time. The wars weren’t over…if anything, they were escalating. Malakai, the demon lord who had slithered into their world, had evaded every trap, every blade, every bullet. His presence hung over them like a storm cloud that refused to break.
It was into this fractured world that Volken Dragic now stepped forward. The quietest of the brothers, the strategist’s equal inforesight but colder, sharper. He thrived in silence, ruled in calculation. If Roman was fire and Lucien was steel, Volken was the knife in the dark.
But knives cut both ways.
Chapter 1
The night had teeth. It bit at my skin as I crouched lower on the rooftop ledge, the cold concrete digging into my palms. My hair, honey gold, the exact shade my father used to say looked like sunlight spun into silk, was pulled back beneath a dark cap, but one loose strand had escaped, clinging stubbornly to my cheek, damp with the mist rising from the alley below. My breath fogged in the air, clashing against the warmth still clinging to my twenty-four-year-old body, too restless, too alive to be swallowed whole by shadows.
I knew how I looked tonight with an oversized hoodie layered under a black jacket, leggings tucked into scuffed boots, not exactly the picture of grace. But even stripped down, even hidden beneath the camouflage of black fabric and grit, I couldn’t escape the things people always noticed first, the honey-coloured hair, the wide amber-brown eyes that matched, a face that had always been a little too soft, a little too open for the hard-edged world I was now trying to survive in.
I was Clumsy, awkward, the girl who spilled her coffee or tripped over her own boots, that was me in daylight. But right now, crouched in the dark, twenty-four years of living as her father’s daughter burned in my veins. Reckless, maybe. Brave, definitely. Every ounce of me honed on the one thing that mattered…finding him.
Eight months. That was how long it had been since my father disappeared. Eight months since his voice had gone silent, his warmth ripped out of my life. People whispered he’d abandonedme. Others said he’d gotten in too deep, that the gambling and debts finally caught up.
They didn’t know him. They didn’t know the man who raised me single-handedly after my mother died when I was seven. They didn’t know the man who taught me how to fix a bike, how to swing a punch, how to spot a lie with a single glance.
My father hadn’t abandoned me. He’d been taken.
People whispered otherwise, of course. They said he’d run, that he’d cut his losses and left me behind. But they didn’t know the nights I’d sat across from him at the kitchen table, listening to his quiet apologies while he shuffled another stack of overdue bills. They didn’t know how many times I’d found him slumped in smoky back rooms, poker chips slipping through his fingers, and how many times I’d dragged him home before the sharks he owed money to came collecting.
Yeah, he had demons, though back then, I thought they were only the humankind. His gambling was an addiction, a chain he never fully broke. And I’d been the one bailing him out more times than I could count, selling off my own things, working doubles, bartering, begging, anything to buy him one more chance.
But he’d been there for me, always. He’d been the one steady thing in my life after Mom died. When I scraped my knees, when bullies made jokes about the girl with no mother, when the world tried to convince me, I was too much of a mess to ever stand on my own, he was the one who told me different. He was the one who never let me believe I was alone.
So maybe he wasn’t perfect. Maybe he stumbled more times than most men ever should. But he was my father. The onlyfamily I had left. And I refused to believe he’d walked away willingly.
I couldn’t lose him too.
And since the day that he had disappeared, I’d spent every hour since then piecing together where.
In the eight months since his disappearance of staring at a cold, silent phone. Eight months of pounding the pavement, of chasing scraps of rumours through dive bars and back-alley dens where men smelled of whiskey and old lies.
I’d broken into his apartment, every drawer, every notebook, every faded business card in the bottom of the junk drawer becoming a map I chased until my eyes burned from lack of sleep. Half the time I ended up with nothing but paper cuts and another dead end. The other half, I found men who didn’t like questions and liked women asking them even less.
I learned how to run fast. I learned how to use a broken beer bottle as a weapon. I learned how to keep my head down when I had to, and how to bluff when I couldn’t.
I’d pawned my mother’s necklace to pay for bus fare to chase a lead that led nowhere. I’d spent nights sleeping in my car, parked outside bars he used to haunt, hoping someone would slip and mention his name. I’d lied, manipulated, threatened, and once, even cried in the right man’s arms just long enough to get a list of warehouses where “business” happened after dark.
