Sovereign Bratva Daddy

I buried my husband and told grief it could keep the rest of me.

Then the most dangerous man in Brighton Beach walked into my flower shop to take my building, and looked at me like something he had come to keep.

Oh no.

Being alone for the rest of my life was the plan.
Falling for the silver-haired sovereign who owns these streets was not.
Yet here he is.
Six-foot-something of scarred, silent Bratva winter.
Fifty-seven. The founder the underworld answers to. A widower who swore he would never say love aloud again, because the last time, it got his wife killed.
He came for my building. He is staying for me.
A shop I rebuilt from my own ashes. A second chance I am too scarred to survive losing.
He moves me inside his compound the night danger finds my door, and gives me a locked house, one impossible garden, and one promise:

"Nothing reaches you again without coming through me first. Let them try."

I mean to keep my walls up and my heart where it is safe.
Then the enemy at his gate tells me the fastest way to make Viktor Sorokin bleed. Me.

But wait.
He finds me in the greenhouse at midnight, coaxing dead things back to life, terrified of all I have to lose.
He does not tell me to be careful.
He gets down in the dirt beside me and learns my silences.

"You are the reason I finally have something worth protecting. Say the word, and I will burn it all down before it touches you."

The way his cold eyes go soft only when they find me...
The way his ruined hands, hands that have ended men, go gentle over a single stem...
The way he says my name like a man who forgot he was allowed to want...

This terrifying man is making me want the whole long future I swore I'd already spent.

If only loving him out loud didn't paint a target on my back, and drop the child I never dreamed I'd carry into his last, bloodiest war.

A steamy silver-fox second-chance mafia romance: a possessive alpha founder, a widowed florist who won't break, a found family that fights dirty, a slow-burn obsession, and a late-life miracle worth razing an empire to keep. Standalone HEA. No cheating, no cliffhangers.