Beginning

A dark, voice-driven prequel to a stalker mafia romance with an obsessive hero, he-falls-first tension, and explicit heat.Before he took her, before the obsession consumed everything, there was a passport photograph and a man who hadn't felt anything in years.Elio Marchetti hasn't felt anything in years. Not for the woman he's engaged to. Not for the empire he's inheriting. Not even for the art collection he built to prove the wiring was still live.His father made him this way. Took a boy who drew horses in the margins of his schoolbooks and built a machine that runs at the same temperature regardless of what it's processing. Credit where it's due. The machine runs beautifully.Then a passport photograph lands on his desk, and the machine does something it has never done before.It stops.