The call came at three in the morning, and he knew before he answered that his father was dead. The omega he had been bonded to at twenty-one, and had not touched in seven years, was waiting for him at the other end of that coast with a seven-year-old boy and a bond he could still feel.Orso Branciforte was twenty-one when the Branciforte clan bound him, without his consent, to the youngest Lanzetta omega in a chapel above the sea. He spent seven years in La Spezia ...

Seven years ago he ran from the clan that killed his father. Today a courier leaves a charter at his archive door, and his body knows the scent on it before his mind does. The Don who signed it is the man he was bonded to in a chapel at twenty-one.Gioele Lanzetta has been Giorgio the translator for seven years. He lives in a mountain village above Padua, working in an archive owned by a man he does not trust, in a language he stopped speaking the night he walked ou...

He walked into the Pakhan's compound under a false contract and left knowing the man he was supposed to fear was his fated mate. Mikhailo Yarevich Drazhny is the head of the Yarev Bratstvo and the most dangerous Alpha on the eastern Adriatic coast. And the codex they decoded together just rewrote both their lives in a language four hundred years old.Aleksy Domitar Ostrovin spent six years as a senior cataloguer at the Biblioteca Civica Hortis in Trieste reading man...

He has been keeping the Capo's child alive in Palermo for three years and the rival house has just found the document that names the boy's bloodline. Manfredi Spatafora has nineteen months as Capo and a council session that has just become a threat to an heir he didn't know existed. Now he has to decide, in the same hour, whether to fight for the covenant or the man who carries it.Cipriano Vintimilla is a paleographer, twenty-eight years old, working under his moth...

He ran from Naples four years ago carrying a secret that could get them both killed. Iuri Voloshyn-Branciforte is the Don of a hybrid Calabrian-Slavic crime clan, and the photograph that arrives at his dinner table shows a three-year-old boy with his grey eyes. He is going to Maratea before morning.Ezechiele Notarbartolo-Filingeri spent four years in a fishing village above Maratea raising a child registered nowhere under a name that does not exist in any commune r...

He came to the Voronin villa as a candidate in a council file, not as a man. Iuri Voronin is the Pakhan of the eastern Adriatic Bratstvo, and he has kept one line in a letter he wrote to the council above his own name: if the candidate declines, the council shall not propose another. What Onorato Filangieri does with that line will take four months to answer.Onorato Filangieri is a freelance manuscript authenticator in Trieste, thirty-one years old, an Omega of the...

He built a life out of closed doors. The Pack Boss of the Sanseverino never stopped searching for the man the bond named his. And what arrives in an envelope on a Tuesday morning in Ravello is the end of eight years of pretending either of them could stay apart.Sabatino Acquaviva spent eight years making himself unreachable. A forensic linguist from a small scholarly family with no pack power and no appetite for it, he kept his distance from the Sanseverino clan th...

He took the contract to keep his mother alive. Don Cesario Galante is the Alpha of the Amalfi coast — patient, precise, and the last man Lior Vadalà should have let past the archive door. But what has been building in four careful weeks of professional distance is no longer something either of them can call work.Lior Vadalà sorted his mother's medical bills into three piles on a Tuesday in late February and knew, by the weight of the cream-linen envelope on the kit...

He took the contract because his mother was dying and the fee was three times his rate. Calogero Maresca is the Don of Villa Maresca and the last Alpha on the Calabrian coast Severiano should have let past his guard. But the bond found them before the work was done, and the pregnancy test on the bathroom counter isn't something either of them can walk away from.Severiano Cilea crossed the strait of Messina on a grey October morning with a leather satchel, a thermos...

He has been carrying the pregnancy for six months and the suppressants have stopped working. Yuriy Zoryanenko is the underboss of the Trieste mob and the Alpha whose bond Lev Voloshyn has been running from since Vienna. And the packed reception room at the Museo Revoltella is the worst possible place for the truth to finally stop hiding.Lev Voloshyn stands on the iron balcony of the Voloshyn townhouse on Via San Nicolò on a cold autumn morning and registers, with t...

Leonardo da Vinci was a gifted painter, talented musician, and dedicated scientist and inventor, designing flying machines, submarines, and even helicopters. Yet he had a hard time finishing things, a problem anyone can relate to. Only thirteen paintings are known to be his; as for the illustrated encyclopedia he intended to create, all that he left were thousands of disorganized notebook pages. Here is an accessible portrait of a fascinating man who lived at a fascinating time—Italy durin...