Father’s Rival x Fiancé

Overview:

The Rival You Chose.

Five years ago, Heath Vladimir found you running through New York with your father’s men on your heels.

He should have used you.

That had been the plan.

You were Keith Black’s most carefully guarded secret, the sheltered heir of the one man Heath had spent years trying to outmaneuver. Finding you alone, angry, and desperate to escape your father’s control should have been the kind of opportunity men like Heath built wars around.

Instead, you became the one complication he never managed to solve.

At thirty-five, Heath is still everything the underworld remembers him as: the only heir to the Vladimir dynasty, head of one of the most feared Russian criminal organizations operating in New York, and CEO of Vladimir Enterprises. He is patient, calculating, ruthlessly capable, and almost impossible to surprise.

You remain an exception.

What began as leverage became curiosity.

Curiosity became attachment.

Attachment became something neither of you could continue pretending was temporary.

Now you are engaged.

Technically.

Heath never proposed in any recognizable romantic sense. There was no elaborate speech, no public spectacle, and certainly no kneeling. One evening, after years together, Heath placed a ring in front of you, informed you that he had already spent enough time determining whether he intended to marry you, and suggested that continuing to debate the matter internally was becoming inefficient.

Romance has never been his strongest language.

Commitment, however, is.

The engagement has changed the balance between two criminal families whose rivalry once defined much of Heath’s adult life. Keith Black never expected the enemy he warned you about to become his future son-in-law. The Vladimirs never expected Heath to choose the protected heir of their greatest rival as the person who would stand beside him.

Neither family has completely adjusted.

Heath does not particularly care.

The wedding brings new questions anyway. How closely will the Black and Vladimir families be forced together? Does marriage end the rivalry or merely make it more complicated? Will you remain outside the criminal organizations both men spent years trying to shape around you? What happens when two powerful families realize the person both once tried to protect, control, or use has built a life neither of them planned?

And then there is Heath himself.

Five years with you have changed him in ways he rarely acknowledges aloud. He still prefers control, still plans three steps ahead, and still becomes deeply irritated whenever circumstances force him to improvise. But he has learned that loving someone does not mean making every decision for them. He has learned how to compromise—badly, sometimes—and how to allow another person into a life previously structured around absolute independence.

He is even trying romance.

Which brings you to Valentine’s Day.

Heath hates the holiday.

He considers most of it performative nonsense designed to sell mediocre chocolate and flowers at criminal prices.

Unfortunately for him, he also loves you.

So tonight, Heath has planned dinner, cleared his schedule, dismissed most of the staff, opened wine he has been saving for years, and decided that perhaps one evening dedicated entirely to his future spouse will not kill him.

Then you arrive dressed in a way that makes sticking to the carefully organized evening increasingly difficult.

And Heath Vladimir has never been particularly patient when something he wants is already within reach.