Bread and Salt

The whole restaurant knows the words. Only the bride knows the song is about her.

I've interpreted for killers and for victims. I had never been engaged on the job.

Zoya Kovalenko is paid to be invisible. A court interpreter in Miami, she turns Russian and Ukrainian into English and keeps her opinions in her purse. So when an FBI agent offers to make her little brother's money-mule charges disappear if she interprets one meeting in a Sunny Isles penthouse and tells him everything she hears, she says yes. It's one meeting.

Then a man with Moscow money offers Matvei Lazarev a bride to seal the peace. Matvei has refused a lot of things in his life, including six years of chances to talk to the government. He refuses the bride too. He's already engaged, he says, and he nods at the interpreter.

Now Zoya has thirty days to marry the head of a Brighton Beach family she was sent to destroy. He cooks for his grandmother on Sundays. He pays for the funerals of men who worked for him. He has never once lied to her. She is lying to him about everything, and she wears a wire to the engagement party, where his grandfather picks up a seven-string guitar and sings the old Odessa song about the girl who sold out the gang.

Fake engagement to forced marriage · undercover heroine · the interpreter in the room · hurricane forced proximity · a grandmother who knows exactly what you are · a family table you'll want a seat at.

Bread and Salt is Book One of Matvei and Zoya's duet in The Lazarev Bratva. It ends on a revelation, and their story concludes in Stars on His Knees. Dark themes, explicit consensual scenes; content notes inside.