Her Gangster Mate

Dilia Cesaire came to Stanford Hill for one normal senior year. With a movie-star mother who would rather drink than call and a father who vanished before she could walk, normal is the one thing she has never been allowed. Her plan is simple: keep her head down, earn her own money, need no one, owe no one.

Then she locks eyes with Andria Giovanni.

He sits at the back of her English class with tattoos creeping out of his hoodie, silver rings on his fingers, and a reputation that clears hallways. The Giovanni family keeps to itself. They don't date. They don't explain. And when Dilia snaps back at its leader instead of shrinking, she earns a detention — and a knife pressed to her throat in an empty classroom.

She disarms him anyway.

After that, Andria cannot stay away. He turns up at her locker, at the restaurant where she waits tables, even in her kitchen, watching her with stormy grey eyes like she is a puzzle he refuses to put down. He is arrogant, possessive, and completely unused to the word no — and she has never been fonder of using it. Dilia tells herself she hates him. She tells herself that a lot, right up until his smirk makes her wonder whether hate is simply a word she is using wrong.

But her new friends are hiding more than attitude. The matching snake tattoos mean something. So do the hushed phone calls in Italian, the bodyguards who shadow the family everywhere, and the way the Giovanni restaurant goes quiet whenever certain men walk in. When an ordinary walk home turns into a blood-soaked fight in a dark alley, it is not the police who save her. It is Andria and his siblings, armed to the teeth, moving like soldiers who have done this before.

Dragged into their world, Dilia discovers a life of loyalty and old blood feuds that should terrify her — and somehow feels more like family than her own ever did. Because the boy the whole city fears keeps blueberry pancakes in his kitchen, remembers that she will eat only the red skittles, and looks at her like she is the first real thing he has ever wanted. Loving him could cost Dilia the heart she has guarded all her life. Leaving him could cost far more, because once you know what the Giovanni family really is, there is no walking away clean.

Now old secrets are stirring and enemies are circling closer than ever — and the father who disappeared may not be the only lie buried in Dilia's past. To survive the year, she must decide who to trust: the mother who never wanted her, the best friend who knows all her secrets, or the gangster's son who swears he will rip the world apart, brick by brick, to keep her safe.

One thing is certain: Stanford Hill's most feared boy did not fall first, and he did not fall quietly.