Collateral for the Don

Chloe's gambling-addict father, deep in five million dollars of debt, uses his own daughter as a bargaining chip, pawning her in a golden cage inside an underground casino to New York's most feared mafia don—Dante. From the very first day of her captivity, Chloe fights back desperately: starvation, threats with a knife, attempts to escape. But Dante uses the most extreme methods—breaking her ex-boyfriend's legs, fitting her with a life-monitoring ankle bracelet, fighting fire with fire—to keep her chained to his side. Yet when a maid's jealousy nearly freezes Chloe to death in an ice cellar, when rival mob bullets fly at her, when her vengeful ex-boyfriend kidnaps her, Dante risks everything every time to snatch her back from the jaws of death. Forged in blood and fire, the once-fragile Chloe slowly darkens and awakens—she shoots enemies, pours wine to humiliate elders, burns a fifty-million-dollar check, and rejects FBI witness protection. She is no longer a caged canary, but a dark queen who willingly stays by the tyrant's side. Finally, at a black-rose wedding in an underground Gothic church in New York, the once-arrogant godfather kneels before her on one knee and offers her his entire dark empire. This is not a redemption story—this is a dark fairy tale of two madmen finding each other in hell.