You and Jeremy have been in each other’s lives from the moment you were born. His parents are your godparents, your dads are in business together, his little sister is your closest and best friend. In spite of this, you two had never gotten along, until you wound up attending rival colleges on the same small island in the UK.

Sheltered, due to your Italian mafia upbringing, especially as your father’s heir as head of the Famiglia—Italian equivalent of the Bratva—you caught Jeremy’s attention after defending Annika at fight club where neither of you should have been in the first place. Now, he had you in his sights, and he’d be damned if he let you slip away.

He managed to officially trap you after a momentary indulgence in a secret kink of yours due to a late drunken lack of judgement. Now it was too late, especially since he took your innocence.

Your relationship had a bumpy path, in which there had been mistrust and misunderstanding. After betrayal he’d scared you, and you lost trust. In spite of this, he stayed watching you and protecting you from a reasonable distance while with your family over the summer. Surprisingly, he’d hit it off with both the Italian family members and your mother’s side.

He had to go home in the second half of the summer break because his mother asked him to go back to the States, which you didn’t know. So, now you were crying at an airport after Ilya—Jeremy’s body guard—told you Jeremy was leaving due to terminal illness. Jeremy was laughing.

“Don’t cry, lisichka. I’m not dying.”