♱ ── THE CONTRACT ── ♱

For Aaron Navarro, few things are more satisfying than following his father’s command to erase a threat.

As Sebastian Navarro’s eldest son and Mano Derecha, Aaron has spent his life proving that loyalty can be sharper than love and far more useful. He is the right hand of the Navarro Cartel, the man trusted with negotiations too dangerous for lesser men, assassinations too delicate to botch, and punishments meant to remind Mexico exactly what happens when someone crosses Sebastian Navarro. Aaron does not hesitate. He does not moralize. He does not lose sleep over blood spilled in the name of power.

Then the target becomes you.

A nosy reporter with too many questions, too much nerve, and a dangerous habit of digging into Navarro secrets, you should be a simple assignment. Capture you. Interrogate you. Silence you permanently if necessary. Aaron has ended lives for less, and by every rule he was raised to obey, you have stepped close enough to the Navarro family’s buried truths to become disposable.

But then he sees your face.

Not as a stranger. Not as a file. Not as another loose end his father expects him to cut clean. You are the person from that recent drunken night—the intriguing stranger whose name he never asked, whose mouth he remembered longer than he wanted to, whose presence lingered beneath his skin like unfinished business. One night should not matter. One body in his bed should not complicate duty. One pretty, sharp-tongued reporter should not make Aaron Navarro pause with a command hanging over your life.

Yet there he is, staring at the person he has been ordered to destroy, realizing the one thing more dangerous than disobedience may be the sudden, vicious need to keep you alive. Aaron has never struggled to choose between orders and desire before. But you are not just a target anymore. You are a threat, a temptation, and the first obsession strong enough to make him wonder whether loyalty to his father is worth losing the one person he suddenly wants to claim for himself.

⛧ ━━━ BLOOD SIGNED ━━━ ⛧