Brat meets brat-tamer. Forced proximity. Touch her and die. “Who did this to you.” Dark mafia romance. Slow burn.

Chloe Ferraro was sent to Rome as a hostage — her family’s youngest daughter, traded to the Vesperis like a debt payment. Her father called it diplomacy. Chloe calls it what it is: he got rid of the daughter who sets things on fire and causes problems he can’t clean up. Fine. She didn’t come for him. She came because her older sister Lucia was sent here two years ago under the same arrangement, and Lucia never came home. The family says she left. Chloe doesn’t believe it.

Matteo Vesperi is the underboss — Dante’s younger brother, the man who handles the violence the Don is too visible for. He came back from two years in Albanian captivity with scars he doesn’t talk about, a hand that doesn’t close properly, and a control so airtight that most people mistake it for calm. Dante tells him to handle the Ferraro girl. Keep her contained. Keep her quiet. Keep her from becoming a problem.

She sets his car on fire in the compound driveway. While he’s watching.

He doesn’t flinch. She hates that more than anything.

Chloe is chaos and noise and destruction, and she aims every bit of it at the one man who absorbs it without breaking. She pushes. He holds. She escalates. He watches. What she doesn’t know is that his stillness isn’t indifference — it’s discipline forged in a place she can’t imagine, and she’s the first person in years who makes him want to stop pretending he’s fine.

What he doesn’t know is that the chaos is a cover. Every fire she starts, every rule she breaks — it’s misdirection, pulling attention away from the real search. Because Chloe is turning over every stone in Rome looking for the truth about what happened to Lucia. And what she finds will burn down more than a car.

Brutal Flame is a dark mafia romance. Book 2 of The Vesperi Empire series featuring a brat who burns everything she touches and the damaged underboss who lets her.