Rejected By The Don. Lowborn Omega Series, #3

Some things kept long enough in the right kind of dark do not decay....they wait. SERENEveryone remembers the first time they were told they were not enough. I remember the exact second. Eleven of them, to be precise. That is how long Enzo Cattaneo looked at me before he opened his mouth and rearranged the entire architecture of my life with four words. Not suitable. He said it the way you say the weather.
Flat. Final. Already moving on before the echo died. Twenty-three men sat at that table. My father was one of them. Not one of them spoke. I was twenty-one, standing in the suit my mother pressed before she died, carrying her name and mine into a room that had already decided what to do with both of us. I walked out of that compound and I did not stop walking until I hit the waterline. And then I built something.
Not to prove him wrong, I told myself that for years, but we both know that is not entirely true. Four years. A port operation running on cold coffee and precision and the particular stubbornness of a person who has nothing left to lose and therefore nothing left to protect. A life that answered to no one. A self that did not require Enzo Cattaneo's signature to exist. I was good at that self. And then the Don walks into a boundary negotiation he had no business attending personally, and he stands across a cathedral quarter lane in the November cold and he looks at me, and something in the room changes temperature, and I understand with the sick clarity of a person whose foundation has just shifted that I have been building on the wrong ground this entire time.. He kept it.
And now he is standing at the door of that room asking if I am ready, and I am twenty-eight years old with my mother's recipe card in my pocket and seven years of architecture in my chest, and I am not sure the person I built on his rejection survives what is waiting on the other side of that door. But I am going in anyway. Because eleven seconds was long enough to break something. And I need to know if it is long enough to build something too. ----If you read for the slow burn that makes you want to scream, the dark world that makes the softness hit harder, and the love story that costs both of them something permanent before it gives them anything at all, this book was written for you. Rejected By The Don features: Enemies to lovers.
Rejection and reclamation. Dark mafia world. Omegaverse heat and scent dynamics. Alpha-Omega power imbalance. Slow burn with explicit heat. Dual POV. Hard-earned HEA.