"You went onto my books the night I carried you up here. Nothing has ever come off my books."I was just an exhausted graduate student cataloging ancient Latin texts for sixteen dollars an hour. But when I cracked the cipher hidden inside a 1542 botanical manuscript, I didn't find history—I uncovered nineteen years of corrupt payoffs to sitting judges, bankrolled by the city's most ruthless syndicate.Before midnight, a kill order had my name on it.I should have died in my kitchen. Instead, an enormous, lethal shadow stepped through my window with a folded cloth soaked in chloroform.Julian Sokolov.He is the calculating sovetnik of the Kirilov Bratva—a cold, terrifying mastermind who moves men like chess pieces. He didn't take me to kill me. He locked me sixty floors above the city inside an impenetrable steel-and-glass vault to keep me breathing.Julian gives me four rules: Do not touch the glass. Do not lie to me. Tell me when you are frightened. When I say your name, look at me.Trapped in his penthouse cage, the lines between captor and savior bleed together. Every cold command and searing touch breaks down my defenses. But the deadliest secret isn’t the ledger in my pocket—it’s that Julian hasn't just noticed me now.He has been watching me from the shadows for eleven years.Now the entire syndicate is hunting the missing transcriber. To protect me, Julian will defy his pakhan, shatter the bones of anyone who dares reach for me, and tear down the very empire he built. But once a monster decides you are his, he never lets you go.TROPE LIST:Captor–Captive / Kidnapped to Protect: He abducts her with chloroform and locks her in a 60th-floor penthouse vault to save her from a mob execution."Touch Her and You Die": A lethally protective hero who brutally breaks hands and shoots anyone who threatens her.Secret Protector / Stalker ("He Fell First"): An obsessive adviser who has secretly tracked, cataloged, and protected her life for eleven years.Dark Academia Meets Dark Mafia: An ancient botanical book cipher, Latin manuscripts, and a bookish transcriber caught in Bratva warfare.Age Gap & Forced Proximity: A sheltered 23-year-old archivist and a lethal 34-year-old mob strategist locked in isolation.High Heat & Praise Kink: Explicit spice featuring power exchange, sensory dominance, consensual bondage, and breathless tension.Hidden by the Boss is a full-length, standalone dark Bratva romantic suspense novel with high spice, a possessive morally gray hero, and a guaranteed HEA. Read more
