Fated to the Crime Boss

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 manuscripts that other people couldn't. He is twenty-eight years old, careful with secrets by profession and by necessity, and the man who arrived at his archive with a private collector's contract was not, as he eventually understood, a private collector. The compound above the Karst plateau is real. The codex is real. And the Pakhan who met him at the foot of the limestone stairs with his mother's warding marks at his cuff and an Omega's bond screaming at Aleksy's back teeth is the man whose organization has been at war with Aleksy's bloodline for three generations. Mikhailo Yarevich Drazhny is the Pakhan of a Bratstvo organization built on a claim of primacy his grandfather swore to and that the codex, once translated, does not support. He needs the only paleographer in Europe who can read thirteenth-century Glagolitic. He does not need a fated mate. He does not need the legal and organizational consequences of a translation that unmakes everything his council has been told for a hundred years. What he finds, on the fourth morning in the vault under the kitchen, is both. He's carrying the heir the council cannot know exists. The Pakhan's authority rests on a document that names Aleksy's bloodline as his equal. Two rival brotherhood lines. One bond. One pregnancy. And a Bratstvo that will not survive the truth…